Jonathan Bailey as a young da Vinci in CBBC’s ‘Leonardo’

Fresh off the acclaim for romantic ghost story All Of Us Strangers, gay filmmaker Andrew Haigh has been tapped by Universal Pictures to helm a “high-priority” biopic of influential Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.

You may say, “why do we need a movie about one of the most famous people in history?,” but we’ll tell you why: We have reason to believe this movie is going to be very, very gay.

Sure, Haigh’s involvement is a huge part of that. The man behind beloved gay romance Weekend (which gets us emotional just thinking about it) and much of HBO’s Looking is one of our most prolific LGBTQ+ writer-directors working today—he’s even directing a new music video for the Pet Shop Boys!—and much of his acclaimed output has explored queer themes.

Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott & Andrew Haigh | Image Credit: Getty Images

But there’s also the fact that this upcoming biopic will be adapted from author Walter Isaacson’s celebrated Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography, which made waves upon its release in 2017 by arguing that the artist lived his life as a gay man.

Was Leonardo da Vinci gay?

Now, if you remember back to high school art classes, many of us were taught that da Vinci was celibate. Though he kept manuscripts with thousands of pages on his work, there were very few references to his personal life, so the prevailing assumption was that he didn’t have romantic or sexual partners.

However, over the years, a number of academics (including Sigmund Freud himself) have threaded together context clues and other texts to deduce that da Vinci was, in fact, gay and had a number of male companions.

“There is no reason to believe that he remained celibate,” Isaacson wrote. “On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead he seemed amused by them.”

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In his biography, the author challenges previous notions about the artist’s sexuality, referencing specific pupils that he strongly believes became da Vinci’s lovers, and citing the many depictions of the male form in his work.

“In his drawings and sketches, he showed a far greater fascination for the male body than the female,” said Isaacson. “His drawings of male nudes tend to be works of tender beauty, many rendered in full length. “By contrast, almost all of women he painted, with the exception of a now lost Leda and the Swan, are clothed and shown from the waist up.”

Image Credit: Getty Images

Of course, you can’t reference da Vinci’s paintings of women without thinking of his most famous work of art ever—excuse us, maybe the most famous work of art ever?—the Mona Lisa. Well, even that may have been a portrait of a man, as many art scholars believe da Vinci’s “muse” may have been one of his companions, Gian Giacomo Caprotti.

There’s also the fact that court records from 1476 show a 24-year-old da Vinci was charged with sodomy, along with three other young men, in an incident involving a male prostitute. The charges were eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence, but still.. bet they didn’t teach you that in grade school!

Despite the fact that sodomy was a crime, homosexuality wasn’t uncommon in the Italian art community of the time, and Isaacson notes da Vinci seemed to have no shame in regard to his attractions: “He made no effort either to hide or proclaim it, but it probably contributed to his sense of being unconventional.”

The list of evidence goes on and on!

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Who should be Leonardo da Vinci in a movie biopic?

And that brings us back to plans to adapt Isaacson’s biography for the big screen. When it was released, there was a Hollywood bidding war for adaptation rights to the book, and at one point Paramount Pictures was going to produce a film with Leonardo DiCaprio tapped to play the artist. Then, in 2018, it was announced that it would be turned into a limited TV series, which would directly address da Vinci’s life as a “gay outsider.”

Of course, neither of those projects came to fruition, but it seems more likely than ever with Haigh officially signing out, and he certainly seems like the right director for the job.

Image Credit: Getty Images

Which leaves us with one big, burning question: Who will play Leonardo da Vinci? Though we mainly think of the artist in his later years (he died at age 67), sporting quite the beard, there’s no denying the man lived a long, full life, with a lot of ground to cover. Perhaps even multiple actors will play him at different ages.

And, at this point, it doesn’t appear that DiCaprio is still attached, so that leaves the door wide open—maybe even for an out, gay actor? Hey, a young Jonathan Bailey played da Vinci once before in the BBC series Leonardo, so that could make the casting process very easy, no?

Or, it could be a long shot, but we’re going to go ahead and put it out there: Cast Murray Bartlett as a fifty-something da Vinci! The hunky Aussie Emmy-winner is well overdue for a leading film role, plus it’d be a nice Looking reunion for him and Haigh.

We would like to see it!

Let us know in the comments below who you’d like to see play Leonardo da Vinci in a big-screen biopic about the artist’s life.

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