Leonardo and the anonymous letter, the 1476 denunciation that put him in the Florentine files

In April 1476 an unsigned note in a Florentine letter box accused a seventeen-year-old apprentice, Jacopo Saltarelli, of sex with four men, and one of them was the young Leonardo da Vinci. The case was dismissed twice, but it is the only official document that ever touched Leonardo's private life.

Florence, 9 April 1476. In the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the city's government, someone drops an unsigned note into one of the wooden boxes called tamburi, set up so that citizens could denounce crimes without giving their names. The note accuses a seventeen-year-old goldsmith's apprentice, Jacopo Saltarelli, of having sex with several men, and it names four of them. One is "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", who lives with the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio¹.

Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-four. He had not yet painted the Last Supper or the Mona Lisa; he was a gifted assistant in one of the busiest workshops in Florence. The anonymous letter of 1476 is the only official document that ever touched his private life. This page tells what it said, who else it named, how the case ended and what historians have made of it since.

The boxes at the Palazzo

Since 1432 Florence had had a magistracy with a single job: prosecuting sodomy. The Officers of the Night, a small board of citizens chosen for short terms, received denunciations, questioned suspects and witnesses, and handed out fines that grew with each conviction².

Denunciations could arrive in person or, more often, in writing, dropped into the tamburi at the Palazzo and in some of the city's churches. The historian Michael Rocke, who studied the officers' surviving records, found that in seventy years about seventeen thousand men were implicated and some three thousand convicted, in a city of about forty thousand².

The note of 1476 was not unusual. What makes it famous is one name on it.

What the note said

The text survives in the officers' register. It says that Jacopo Saltarelli, brother of Giovanni Saltarelli, lived with his brother at the goldsmith's shop in Vacchereccia, a street just off the Piazza della Signoria, and that he was about seventeen years old¹.

In one widely quoted English translation, it calls him party to many wretched affairs, a youth who consents to please those persons who request such wickedness of him. Then come the names: Bartolomeo di Pasquino, a goldsmith in Vacchereccia; Leonardo, living with Verrocchio; Baccino, a doublet-maker near Orsanmichele; and Lionardo Tornabuoni, known as il Teri¹.

Jacopo Saltarelli was seventeen. Today he would be a minor, and the men named with him were adults. In fifteenth-century Florence that was the most common pattern of all: a young man in his twenties, not yet married, and an adolescent partner, as described in the chapter on the Renaissance and Baroque².

Nothing else is known about Saltarelli. His name appears in these records and nowhere else that historians have found.

The young man in Verrocchio's workshop

Leonardo had been born on 15 April 1452 at Vinci, a hill town west of Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary, ser Piero, and a young woman called Caterina. As an illegitimate son he could not follow his father's profession, and as a teenager he was apprenticed to Verrocchio, painter, sculptor and goldsmith, who worked for the Medici³.

In 1472 Leonardo was enrolled in the painters' confraternity of Saint Luke. By 1476 he was still living and working with his master, and had already painted a kneeling angel in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ that, according to Giorgio Vasari's later story, was so good that the older man gave up painting.

He was, by every account, strikingly handsome, elegant, fond of fine clothes and good company. None of that is evidence of anything. It does explain why an anonymous informer might have found his name worth adding to a list.

A Tornabuoni on the list

The fourth name mattered most at the time. The Tornabuoni were one of the richest families in Florence, and Lorenzo de' Medici's mother, Lucrezia, was a Tornabuoni. A case that touched the family of the city's leading man was a delicate thing¹.

The officers did what the law allowed. An unsigned accusation of sodomy was not enough on its own; it needed witnesses or a confession. Nobody came forward, and the five were released on condition that no further denunciation turned up.

On 7 June 1476 a second note naming the same people appeared. Once again nobody testified, and once again the case was dismissed. Some historians think the Tornabuoni connection helped everyone; others point out that most anonymous accusations ended this way. Both may be true².

After the files

The case did not slow his career. In January 1478 the government of Florence commissioned Leonardo to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of San Bernardo inside the same Palazzo della Signoria where the note had been posted. He never finished it³.

He also watched the city's justice at work from the other side. In December 1479 he made a careful pen sketch of Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, one of the conspirators who had murdered Giuliano de' Medici in the cathedral the year before, hanging from a window of the Bargello, and noted in the margin the colours of the clothes he died in. A city that hanged its enemies in public and read anonymous letters about its young men was the city Leonardo knew.

In his notebooks there is a single, puzzling line, usually translated as: when I made a baby God you put me in prison, now if I make him grown up you will do worse to me. Nobody knows what it refers to. Some biographers have linked it to 1476, but there is no record that Leonardo was ever in prison¹.

Around 1482 he left Florence for Milan, where he stayed for almost twenty years. He never married and left no known love letters, to men or to women. The young men who lived with him as pupils and assistants are documented, but what their relationships were, the documents do not say.

A note that became a biography

The records were found in the Florentine archives in the late nineteenth century, and they changed how people wrote about Leonardo. In 1910 Sigmund Freud built a whole psychological study on the artist's sexuality, starting from a childhood memory in the notebooks, and the 1476 accusation became part of the case⁴.

Since then the note has been cited as proof that Leonardo loved men, dismissed as malicious gossip, and treated as a sign of how ordinary such accusations were. Martin Kemp and other specialists have stressed that the document proves only that someone wanted to accuse him⁵.

What it does show is the world Leonardo lived in: a city where desire between men and youths was common, illegal and policed by anonymous letters, and where a gifted young painter could end up in the files of the night officers like thousands of other Florentines. The wider story, from the Officers of the Night to Michelangelo's sonnets, is told in the chapter on the Renaissance and Baroque.