Country: Italy
Birth: 4/15/1452
Death: 5/2/1519
Biography: Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was a true Renaissance man--artist, engineer, inventor, musician.Today he is best known for his paintings, including two of the most famous paintings in the world, but he was notorious for not finishing (or even beginning) commissions, which is why we have fewer than twenty completed paintings. We do, however, have over 7,000 pages of notebooks. He was left-handed, illegitimate, vegetarian, and known for his good looks, fashion, and charm. And he was probably gay. In 1476 he was twice accused of sodomy, but the charges were dismissed due to a lack of witnesses. Fun fact: sodomy was so common in fifteenth-century Florence that the German word Florenzer (Florentine) because slang for sodomite. Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno moved in with Leonardo in 1490 and almost immediately earned his nickname Salaì (little devil) by stealing some money Leonardo set aside to buy him clothes. He continued to often steal from Leonardo and spend the money gambling and drinking. It is widely assumed they eventually became lovers, and Laonardo’s early biographer Gian Paol Lomazzo said as much, and also suggested it started when Salaì was fifteen (yikes), making Leonardo forty-three (double yikes). (Lomazzo never met Leonardo, but knew his student, Francesco Melzi.) Salaì stayed with Leonardo for decades until shortly before Leonardo’s death. Leonardo left him a vineyard and the Mona Lisa. To quote Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, “Either this was true love, or Salai had one hell of a sugar daddy.”