1549-02-14

Il SODOMA, who died on this date, was the name given to the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Il Sodoma painted in a manner that superimposed the High Renaissance style of early 16th-century Rome onto the traditions of the provincial Sienese school; he spent the bulk of his professional life in Siena, with two periods in Rome.

He brazenly embraced the moniker “Sodoma,” even weaving it into songs he sang while painting. While other artists cloaked their personal lives in discretion, Bazzi was living openly with male lovers and turning heads in the process. His frescoes, many of them religious, pulse with a sensual energy—nude figures rendered with such reverence and beauty that they blur the line between sacred and erotic. One of his most famous works, in the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, features dreamy-eyed young men whose bodies wouldn’t be out of place in a Tom of Finland sketch.
 
Il Sodoma didn’t just paint like a Renaissance master—he lived like a queer icon centuries ahead of his time, scandalizing popes and delighting patrons. 
 
In his youth, Bazzi had married, but he and his wife soon separated. A daughter married Bartolomeo Neroni, called also Riccio Sanese or Maestro Riccio, one of his principal pupils. Bazzi acquired his nickname of Il Sodoma, as it were “the sodomite“, from as early as 1512. This appears to have been one among various nicknames, he was also known as Mattaccio or Matazo (“the madman”) among the monks of Monte Oliveto. It is due to the contemporary art historian Giorgio Vasari that Bazzi’s nickname of Il Sodoma has become conventional. According to Vasari’s testimony, Bazzi always surrounded himself with “boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent”, for which reason he acquired the nickname Il Soddoma. Still, according to Vasari, Bazzi took pride in the nickname and composed stanzas and songs about it.
 

His first important works were frescoes in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, on the road from Siena to Rome, illustrating the life of St Benedict in continuation of the series that Luca Signorelli had begun in 1498. Gaining fluency in the prevailing popular style of Pinturicchio, Sodoma completed the set in 1502 and included a self-portrait with badgers and ravens.

Sodoma was invited to Rome in 1508 by the celebrated Sienese merchant Agostino Chigi and was employed there by Pope Julius II in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. He executed two great compositions and various ornaments and grotesques in vaulted ceilings divided into feigned compartments in the antique manner that Pinturicchio had recently revived, working at the same time as Raphael. Giorgio Vasari’s rhetorical story that Sodoma’s larger works did not satisfy the pope, who engaged Raphael to substitute a program of Justice, Poetry, and Theology, is not borne out by the documents.

Before October 1510 he was in Siena, where he painted the exterior of Palazzo Chigi in monochrome chiaroscuro with scenes from the Bible and from Antiquity, the first such work seen in Siena. His painting at this time began to show distinct Florentine influences, especially of Fra Bartolommeo.