De Pisis chose one of these models, Bruno Scarpa, to be his gondolier. The handsome Scarpa, decked out in the splendid livery that De Pisis had designed for him, also served at De Pisis's afternoon teas, which attracted a diverse group of guests.

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De Pisis was known for his evening entertaining as well. To celebrate the end of the war, he threw a party at which twenty boys--"uno più bello dell'altro" ("each one more beautiful than the other"), he noted in his diary--danced wearing only strings of shells around their loins. Local police raided the event, described in the Giornale di Venezia as an "assemblea orgiastica," and arrested nineteen people including De Pisis, who spent a night in jail.

Despite his growing notoriety, De Pisis enjoyed professional success and critical acclaim. At the 1948 Venice Bienniale a room was devoted to some thirty of his works. He was not, however, awarded the grand prize, apparently because of objections on the grounds of his sexuality.

At about this time De Pisis's health began to decline due to a nervous disorder, and he found it necessary to enter a neurological clinic near Milan. Despite his medical problems, he continued to paint nearly until his death on April 2, 1956.

De Pisis's art is at once individual and synthetic. Because his work is not within a particular movement, it has to some extent been marginalized. Barry Schwabsky states that "de Pisis was . . . uncannily able to pay rich and explicit pictorial homage to other artists without violating the canons of his own style."

Matthew Gale and Valerio Rivosecchi describe his "distinct style" as "fresh and sensual" and contend that it "is shared by his male nudes, cityscapes and extraordinary still-lifes, in their liberal juxtaposition of disparate objects and free ordering of space, the whole suspended in delicate patterns of light and patches of colour."

Loredana Parmesani also alludes to the sensuality of De Pisis's painting, saying that in it "[e]veryday simplicity oozes with lust, eroticism [and] voluptuousness."

The Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Filippo de Pisis in his native Ferrara has a collection of some two hundred works--oil paintings, water colors, and drawings. Subjects include still-lifes, cityscapes, and paintings of young men, described as voluttosi nudi maschili ("voluptuous male nudes").

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

A large number of significant twentieth-century European artists focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themes, making such concerns crucial to the understanding of twentieth-century European art.

Throughout much of history, the nude male figure was virtually the only subject that could be used to articulate homoerotic desire in publicly displayed works of art, as well as those works of art intended for private "consumption."

An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.

One of the major British artists of the twentieth century, Duncan Grant was also the sexual catalyst of the Bloomsbury Circle.