He was a great artist who has been dealt with unjustly, partly, perhaps, because of the prejudice of Vasari,--whose admiration for Michelangelo amounted to worship, but who is contemptuous toward Sodoma and grudging of praise,--partly because his work is little known out of Italy and not very easy of access there.

Reckless, unbalanced, and eccentric in his life, Sodoma revealed in his painting a peculiar feminine softness and warmth--which indeed we seem to see also in his portrait of himself at Monte Oliveto Maggiore--and a very marked and tender feeling for masculine, but scarcely virile, beauty.[64] Cellini was probably homosexual.

He was imprisoned on a charge of unnatural vice and is himself suspiciously silent in his autobiography concerning this imprisonment.[65] In the seventeenth century another notable sculptor who has been termed the Flemish Cellini, Jerome Duquesnoy (whose still more distinguished brother Francois executed the Manneken Pis in Brussels), was an invert; having finally been accused of sexual relations with a youth in a chapel of the Ghent Cathedral, where he was executing a monument for the bishop, he was strangled and burned, notwithstanding that much influence, including that of the bishop, was brought to bear in his behalf.[66] In more recent times Winkelmann, who was the initiator of a new Greek Renaissance and of the modern appreciation of ancient art, lies under what seems to be a well-grounded suspicion of sexual inversion.

His letters to male friends are full of the most passionate expressions of love.

His violent death also appears to have been due to a love-adventure with a man.