who had been his models. He was condemned. Every effort to save his life was frustrated, because of vehement clerical hostility. His magnificent private collections were confiscated; and he was strangled and burned in September, 1654.
The accent of similisexualism, "not distinctly of pederasty, attaches to Van Dyck, that most "cavalier" of portraitists, whose sense of physical beauty and distinction in both men and women was so fine. Van Dyck's psychos seems to have been dionysian-uranian, in many aesthetic aspects. There is a strain of uranianism in the personality and work of Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) the once much-admired painter—an intimate Mend of the archeologist Winckelman; although Mengs was considerably "a married man", in his attitude toward domestic and social life. Anecdotes more amusing than edifying are in key with Mengs's bisexuality.[1]
It is not in the province of this study to catalogue, contemporary painters and sculptors to be counted as uranistic; now in one degree and phase, now another. The studios of London, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Naples, New York and anywhere else acquaint one with names of
- ↑ There is a striking element of the plastically uraniah quality in the paintings of a group of French classicists, i. e. David, Giron, Girodet (particularly the second-named artist), which the visitor to various representative collections, including the Louvre, will remark. The suggestion applies to artists whose youth or maturity subjected them to influences—social or intellectual—of the French Revolution, with its vehement sentimentalities for everything that was Greek and Roman, from the political diction in the Convention, or at the Jacobins, Cordeliers and other clubs, down to names, emblems, bandeaux, sandals and phrygian bonnets. In fact, a curious study has yet to be written on the Revolution's influences toward homosexuality in France, as a result of the revival of a pseudo-"classic" and greco-roman colouring of life and ideas, and of the Revolutionary abrogation of Christianity.
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