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.
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