Salai

  In 1494 Leonardo was walking in the countryside around Milan when he saw a boy dressed in rags sketching the goats he was tending.  The boy's father, being poor, agreed to let Leonardo take the boy into his care.  His name was Gian Giacomo Copotti da Oreno. Because he was badly behaved Leonardo nicknamed him Salai being short for Salaino meaning "little devil."

  No one can be certain as to Leonardo's sexuality.  Some say that the Allegory of Pleasure and Pain may depict Salai as Pleasure and Leonardo as Pain joined back to back. In the Codex Atlanticus an assistant has drawn two-legged penises moving towards a small round hole labeled "Salai."  We have already seen the Angel in the Flesh in the Art section of this site and noted the drawings of effeminate young men with curly hair as seen above.

  Leonardo may not have practiced sex at all.  His writings about the penis (the famous "della verga" passage from one of his notebooks), his Coitus drawing and comments on the Allegory of Pleasure and Pain show amusement and disdain for sexual practices and perhaps an unconscious realisation that sexual activity for him would be a wasteful discharging of his energies as it is thought that genius sublimates the libido to some extent channelling it into creativity.  For evidence of this note the comments accompanying the Allegory of Pleasure and Pain in which Leonardo makes an oblique reference to masturbation as "those pleasures which are often the cause of the failing of life."