Thursday, November 27, 2014

[BadArtHistory] Most Renaissance Artists were like, so gay, and other nuggets of wisdom from the TIL archives badhistory


Oh, TIL. Never it seems like even way back then, it was still the same. It' just a swirling twister of every diseased idea that ever crawled out of any internet dwellers brain, malnourished and coughing. I have my fucking pick of comments here. Let's get started, then.



Most Renaissance artists were believed to be gay, or have gay affairs at least, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, ecetera... It's said that if Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered



Oh, please do go on, Maestro Vasari the 2nd, because your hypothesis is fascinating to me, especially since I'm home alone with a bottle of Captain Morgan, and I might just have a masochist complex. Hold on, let me light a scented candle and break out the KY, since as long as we're going to be watching this TIL-ologist violate history, we might as well be comfortable with a hand free while we're doing it.



Most Renaissance artists were believed to be gay, or have gay affairs at least, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, ecetera...



Just because the only three Renaissance artists that this guy can remember are Michelangelo, Leonardo, and that Cara-whoever that showed up first on your google search terms for "gay renaissance artists" might have enjoyed men-- does not mean that "most Renaissance artists were believed to be gay". It doesn't even come close to meaning that.


If you want to split hairs, then it is certainly possible that many artists at the time were "gay" if you count being "gay" as having flings with men, romances with men, bromance with men or once writing vaguely erotic poetry about men. However, that still doesn't fly. See, "most" is a disingenuous term. There are a LOT of artists during the Italian Renaissance, and surprise, not as many mentions for desire of men as you'd think. Let's see here. Just off of the top of my head-- we have Bramante, architect, designer of St. Peter's Basilica that Michelangelo would go on to execute. No mention of him being gay.


Titian, the man I believe to be most deserving of being the fifth teenage ninja turtle. Given that he had FOUR children, two sons, one daughter, and one daughter who died as an infant, and TWO wives, it seems like this 'gay renaissance artist' was dragged into heterosexuality kicking and screaming, wasn't he? How about... Raphael? I mean, with a name like that, how could you not be gay?


Oh, wait.


Vasari, the real one, famously claimed that Raphael was such a man-slut, that he had actually sexed himself to death on Good Friday-- "after a night of excessive sex with his main chick Magherita Luti, he fell into a fever and died when given the wrong cure." This being a fitting end to a 37-year life spending the first few years of his life reeling from being pooped out by a vagina, and spending the last half of his life desperately trying to get back in.


Now, I could go on rambling into 50-page pdf about all of the artists that weren't gay-- or I could leave it at this:


If you want to be, I don't know-- correct-- then you'd be obliged to know that exactly zero artists were gay, had gay affairs, or even have a concept of what the hell 'gay' is, since as has been eludiated many, many times in this sub, so many times such that the dead horse has been beaten, turned into glue and now haunts a third-grader's macaroni art project stuck to his mom's refrigerator, the identification of gay is a relatively new phenomenon; the term only really started getting traction within the last century or so, so your presentism of assigning the label "gay" to people hundreds of years in the past doesn't count for the shit on the toilet paper you wiped with.


hey


wait



Most Renaissance artists were believed to be gay, or have gay affairs at least, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, ecetera...



Son.



... or have gay affairs at least, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, ecetera...



Of.



Caravaggio, ecetera...



A.



Caravaggio



Bitch.


I remember where I've heard Caravaggio from. Does this asshole really mean Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio-- as known as Amerighi? Sure, he quite possibly had an appreciation for the rougher sex-- And oh fuck this, seriously.


He's a BAROQUE ARTIST.


BAROQUE: (1600 -> 1700)


also known as NOT FUCKING RENAISSANCE


THE HIGH RENAISSANCE ENDED WITH THE DEATH OF RAPHAEL


MANNERISM APPARENTLY DON'T REAL


FUCK



It's said that if "Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpaper"



This guy doesn't seem to let the fact that a comedian said this quote stop him from repeating it unironically. And even if this is a joke, what exactly is the implication here? That if Michelangelo would have been a worse artist for the measure if he had been into chicks, not dicks? That (let's just pretend Michelangelo's whole fling with Vittoria doesn't exist here) it wasn't his hyper-obsession with sculpting that led him to become such a transcedent artist, it was the dicks, man, the dicks.


Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick. So TIL people can't be bothered to read more than 140 characters, apparently intending to consume literally all their media through either Tweets and Tweet-sized bites of info; spitting it right back out for other Tweetivores to consume no matter what kind of refuse it, where they too, in their reflection of their uninteresting personalities intend to repeat such refuse in a bid to make other people think them as interesting, god forbid original thought. Thus, we get bullshit like "being ghey makes the sistyne chapel" from a down on their luck comedian, some vapid-nobody steals the joke, treats it like the Word of God 2nd Edition, spreads it as far as wide as they possibly can and a million echoes follows.



Oh and the Mona Lisa may actually be a man



Oh, look, the OP rears his freakin' head.


... this.... stupid.... I don't even want to find out what possessed anyone to conclude that the Mona Lisa was a portrait of a... man...



Perhaps a self-portrait from his younger days



or... of Da Vinci...


OR ANYONE. OTHER. THAN. Lisa di Antonia Martia Gherardini, wife of Francesco de Giocondo, the woman who it was comissioned for, and the only person we have any real evidence to support the painting being about her, as opposed to active imaginations and the ghostly memories of concrete evidence.


Just to make things perfectly clear. It's not fucking Leonardo Da Vinci, it's not fucking Salai. It's not fucking Verrocchio or the ghost of Botticelli or whoever the walk-the-Italian-states fuck anyone thinks it is. It's Lisa. Christ. I don't even want to guess where these bullshit alternate views came from. The last time I did, I found out that gynecologists and neurosurgeons apparently have more pull on the public's perception of ART than actual ART historians, meaning people now think Michelangelo painted a brain on a ceiling that one time, and I now have to study for a major that won't end up as a wall decoration like a BA's AH degree.



Okay, but maybe (being gay) was just a phase! And then he started painting picures of women and immediately gave up his homosexual desire. That seems logical. This makes me feel more normal about fapping to the Mona Lisa while in the Louvre.



I have no words. I'd let Captain Morgan do the talking but I find drooling on the keyboard doesn't translate to well to text on screen.


uj


See? Nope.



Leo was awesome, we could use more like him today



He was a genius gay or not, nobody can debate that



I'd Debate it Does Autism count as Genius?





Oh look, contrarian TIL-ologists in every direction.


This guy WOULD debate it because this guy wouldn't know his shit from his spit if gravity wasn't doing the hard work for him, and if autism counts as genius, I'll be the first to sign this guy up for Mensa.


Sit down; shut up; Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius; The End.



I've read it that it's ambiguous whether he was gay or not, and that in all likelihood he was celibate. It was common in Florence to accuse enemies of sodomy (it carried the death penalty) and it's possible this was one of those cases. It's worth nothing that only in the twentieth century did historians start to speculate that he was gay.



This is largely correct. The only issue I have with this statement is that the implication is that Leonardo was accused of sodomy, along with four other men, as an attempt to get him executed. First off, if he was to be seriously accused, he would have had to have been accused with a signature; the original accusation was unsigned, and therefore considered invalid. Second off, even if he was to be seriously accused, he would definitely been given multiple chances to recant, pray the gay away, whatever. Especially in light of his talents. I mean, hell. Florence was known to be gay. Like, super gay. It was at least, I don't know the world's second biggest homo-hub. If they executed every dude who banged another dude in the halls of the buildings of Florence, there would be no one left in Florence, and the Germans would have no one to mock for being as effeminite as a 'Florenzer'.


Case in point, Leonardo was not accused of sodomy to get him executed, and definitely not in a place as semen-soaked as Florence was. Someone dropped an anonymous tip into the accusation box most likely as a Renaissance-era form of fucking with him. It was not a good way of getting people convicted; it was an excellent way of defaming and just screwing with whatever miserable jagoff you felt deserved it.


Of course, in reply the OP swings in with more tweet-level nuggets of genius.



I've read it that it's ambiguous whether he was gay or not, and that in all likelihood he was celibate. It was common in Florence to accuse enemies of sodomy (it carried the death penalty) and it's possible this was one of those cases. It's worth nothing that only in the twentieth century did historians start to speculate that he was gay.



Well he did live with an openly gay assistant for 20-years.... Just saying




Yeah, sure. Let's just ignore years and years of scholarship and debate on Leonardo Da Vinci's sexuality, and the section of his personal diary where he goes on to call sex "The act of procreation and anything that has relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there was no pretty faces and sensous dispositions." because Salai had cartoons of his bum being chased by penises with feet, so that settles that.


Tl;DR oh my gawd that bitch Leonardo was not even gay. He was such. A poser.


Source: assorted drunken snippets from Gardener's Art Through The Ages second edition.







Submitted November 27, 2014 at 11:21PM by Yulong http://ift.tt/1rzlvDr badhistory

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