Ariosto wrote in his satires, no doubt too extremely:-- "Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti."[58] Tasso had a homosexual strain in his nature, but he was of weak and feminine constitution, sensitively emotional and physically frail.[59] It is, however, among artists, at that time and later, that homosexuality may most notably be traced.

Leonardo da Vinci, whose ideals as revealed in his work are so strangely bisexual, lay under homosexual suspicion in his youth.

In 1476, when he was 24 years of age, charges were made against him before the Florentine officials for the control of public morality, and were repeated, though they do not appear to have been substantiated.

There is, however, some ground for supposing that Leonardo was imprisoned in his youth.[60] Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths and his pupils were more remarkable for their attractive appearance than for their skill; to one at least of them he was strongly attached, while there is no record of any attachment to a woman.

Freud, who has studied Leonardo with his usual subtlety, considers that his temperament was marked by "ideal homosexuality."[61] Michelangelo, one of the very chief artists of the Renaissance period, we cannot now doubt, was sexually inverted.