By Dr. Bill Lipsky–
According to the distinguished Renaissance humanist and scholar Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), “Jàcopo Bonfàdio (c. 1508–1550), a man otherwise not in the last place among the erudite, because of copulation with boys (a most vile and sordid thing), was beheaded in prison and publicly burned. The French Dominique Phinot (c. 1510–1556), a distinguished musician, was also killed in the same way for a very similar folly.” So ended the lives of two of the most famous and influential individuals of their time.
Bonfàdio’s résumé was indeed impressive. Born near Lake Garda and educated in Verona and Padua, he worked as a secretary and tutor for a number of prominent families in Naples and Rome, including the son of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, whose father, a devout humanist and former lover of Lucrezia Borgia, wrote about achieving Christian perfection through the development of human virtue. In 1544, he left to teach philosophy at the University of Genoa, where he was commissioned to write a history of the Republic since 1528.
The commission was his downfall. His masterwork, Annales Genuendis, infuriated Genoa’s most powerful families, who did not appreciate his daring both to chronicle and criticize their actions. They vowed revenge. Bonfàdio was accused of sodomy “with a wellborn boy,” tried, convicted of “unnatural acts,” and condemned to death. After he was beheaded, his body was burned at the stake, a hugely disgraceful public action at a time when Genoese laws punished by fire only witchcraft, heresy, and homosexuality. The minutes of his trial were disappeared.
Bonfàdio’s writings were widely influential during his lifetime, but his greatest enduring contribution to humanity was his concept of una terza natura, a place “where human artistry and natural elements intertwine to create a unique aesthetic experience.” This concept was first exemplified in the great formal gardens of Renaissance Italy, and is now found worldwide. He envisioned geometric, ordered landscapes, with everything working in harmony to promote reverie and meditation. His name may not be widely remembered, but in these gifts to the soul, his legacy and influence endure.
We know very little about the life of Dominique Phinot. Widely celebrated in his own age of faith and deeply underappreciated in our secular time, he wrote two Masses, four Magnificats, dozens of popular songs, motets, and much more. Renowned as a master of polyphony, an honor he shared with his contemporary Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495–1560), he made major contributions to the development of the 8-voice double-choir technique. Writing in 1556, German organist and early music theorist Hermann Finck (1527–1558) described him as one of the “most distinguished, excellent, and subtle composers.”
Except for the single line about him in Cardano’s extensive opus, we would have no information at all about Phinot’s fate. Based upon the account he published in 1561, scholars believe that he suffered for his passions sometime between 1557–1560. We do not know who accused him or where or how he met his fate. We only know that neither his reputation nor his influential friends could save him. Fortunately, his music has survived the eddies of time.
Gombert barely escaped his colleague’s ill-fortune for the same “moral lapse.” Possibly the most influential composer of his day, he became magister puerorum (teacher of children) at the court chapel of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) in 1529. He remained in that position until sometime between 1538 and 1540, when, according to Cardano, he was “condemned to the triremes for violation of a young man in the emperor’s service.” Cardano believed the penalty “was not a hard one, for he endured a punishment he deserved.”
History does not remember how Gombert, a galley slave sentenced to spend the rest of his life in chains, was able to continue writing music or how his new compositions reached the ear of the Emperor. Sometime between 1547 and 1552, however, His Imperial Highness, “patron of all illustrious men,” was so moved by what Cardano described as Gombert’s Swan Songs that he “released him from the forced labor of the galleys.” He “also received a priest’s benefice, so that he spent the remainder of his life in tranquility.”
Ironically, for all his stated disapproval of same-sex intimacy, Cardano was himself accused of impropriety within his household in 1562. “I was a professor at Pavia,” he wrote, where he lived with “a nurse and the youth Ercole Visconti, two boys, and a servant, as I believe. Of these boys, one was an amanuensis and a musician, the other a page.” His rivals, “most anxious that I should leave the city,” simply “circulated the rumor everywhere that I was using my boys for immoral purposes.”
The accusations, according to his biographer Henry Morley, writing in 1854, were “founded on the fact that Cardano, whose love for music was a ruling taste, generally maintained in his house, according to the custom of the age, a singing boy.” His enemies failed to get him dismissed from the university, but disgraced and disgusted by the experience, he moved from Pavia to Bologna, where he became a professor of medicine. He was later charged with heresy for casting a horoscope of Jesus, but avoided punishment.
One of the most influential thinkers of his age, Cardano was a true Renaissance Man, a polymath who wrote more than 200 articles and books about everything from the immortality of the soul, astronomy, dreams, astrological signs, medicine, optics, biology, geology, chemistry, witchcraft, history, psychiatry, and magnetism, to music, probability, algebra, and physiognomy. He produced the first systematic study of probability, published solutions for cubic and quadratic equations, made the first methodical use of negative numbers in algebra, and introduced binomial coefficients and binomial theorem to Europe.
Immensely influential during his lifetime, some scholars credit him with perfecting the combination lock and the Cardan shaft with universal joints, still used in vehicles today. In addition, as an educator, he was the first to argue that deaf people could learn to read and write without knowing how to speak first. Like the achievements of Bonfàdio, Phinot, and Gombert, Cardano’s work remains deeply woven into the fabric of our time and place, whether we remember his name or not.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “LGBTQ+ Trailblazers of San Francisco” (2023) and “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
Faces from Our LGBT Past
Published on July 31, 2025
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