Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/259

 The social and political history of the Italian Renaissance is incidentally a history of uranianism in high-life, so diffused that the emotion was a concurrent of patrician æstheticism, in all major centers of Italy's awakened culture. Such families as the Baglioni, the Medici, the Borgia, the Sforza, the Visconti, offer numerous contrasted examples. Savonarola's sermons in Florence vehemently dealt with such instincts. Its aristocratic tolerance was considered, by the Italian Church particularly, as the principal cause of scourges of the epoch—the plague, famines, invasions of the Turkish hosts, earthquakes and inundations. The jurist Carpzovius, as late as 1645, advocated the burning alive of all homosexuals, for the reason last mentioned! That homosexuality should flourish in the Renaissance in Italy, was natural, as a part of the return to Greek cults of the Beautiful. But it did not decline as that sentiment calmed: and it has not done so in Italy to-day, nor will it do so, especially in Central and South-Italy. The Italian is perennially heterosexual and homosexual, in a degree sometimes puzzling. He has by race-inheritance an intense sexual feeling for male beauty, along with his sensuous-sexual appreciation of feminine charms. In Italian high life, especially where not strongly parisianized, the Italian aristocrat as uranian or dionian never is rare.

One of the most melancholy and picturresque [sic] figures in recent royal homosexualism was King Ludwig II of Bavaria. King Ludwig is another example of the gifted Uranian inextricably "out of place', by being born to a throne. He was a true Wittelsbach in his vividly intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities; with the concurrent Wittelsbach taint of madness in his blood. Aversion to Ludwig II as a careless ruler, as a vast spendthrift, through show-castles and Wagnerism, of his country's revenues, as imitator of Louis XIV