![]() There is little doubt that Leonardo was arrested. ![]() In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci, on the verge of his twenty-fourth birthday, was named as one of four men who had practiced “such wickedness” with the seventeen-year-old apprentice of a local goldsmith. The common nature of the offense did not erase the threat of serious consequences. But the crime that the government was really trying to control was sodomy, so notoriously prevalent that contemporary German slang for a homosexual was Florenzer. In Renaissance Florence, a number of designated boxes placed throughout the city allowed citizens to make anonymous denunciations of various moral crimes-in 1461, for example, the artist-monk Filippo Lippi was accused of fathering a child with a nun. ![]() ![]() Illustration by Tamara Shopsin engraving from Hulton Archive / Getty A new biography celebrates the great artist’s more scientific innovations. ![]()
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