In 15th century Florence, humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino revived the notion of platonic love, integrating it into Renaissance Christianity. Beauty, he believed, both physical and moral, could inspire us with a glimpse of the divine. This glimpse could be expressed best via visions of Venus (more on that here) and via the Four Furies: poetic, mystical-religious, prophetic, and erotic.

To contemporary eyes - the preachers in particular - celebrating the erotic seemed like elitists justifying sodomy. It would bring down the wrath of God, they said. Yet despite periodic crackdowns, male-male relationships were common in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Below is the bottom left corner of a fresco in Florence by Domenico Ghirlandaio called Angel appearing to Zacharias (1486-90). Ficino is the figure on the far left. Both Ficino and Poliziano (third from left) were considered homosexual, as was Ficino's influential student, Pico Della Mirandola (not shown), who brought Savonarola to Florence in 1490. The full painting shows the Academy elite in Florence under the Medicis and this particular group is the humanist intellectuals and scholar-poets (no artists to be seen).

The deluge came with the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492, a French invasion and Savonarola's rise to power. These four men considered themselves friends and colleagues of Savonarola, but Florentine intellectuals were forced to pick sides once he intensified his crusade against sodomy. Savonarola would fall in 1498 but the careers of most of these men would be over.

Ficino was more than willing to condemn sodomy if that would help. But this world was almost exclusively male and, sooner or later, passion for boys kept getting in the way, as it did for Michelangelo and Leonardo, although only Michelangelo seemed bothered by it. Below is one of Michelangelo's ignudi from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, one of 20, with the infamous acorns at left which were dubbed "penis-heads" in local parlance.

(Neo-) platonic love, on the other hand, would survive by being extended to courtly heterosexual love - the tradition of Dante and Beatrice - which is pretty much where it is today.