1144. MADONNA AND CHILD.
Bazzi, called Il Sodoma (Lombard: 1477-1549).
The confusion in the use of the word "school" is illustrated in the case of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (sometimes wrongly given as Razzi), called also Il Sodoma. He spent most of his life at Siena, and is often grouped therefore with the Sienese School. But he was born at Vercelli, in Piedmont—being the son of a shoemaker—and "ripened into an artist during the two years he spent at Milan with Leonardo da Vinci" (1498-1500). Sodoma is therefore, says Morelli (German Galleries, p. 428), to be reckoned as one of the Milanese-Lombard School. "Nay, I believe I should not be far wrong were I to maintain that the majority of the better works ascribed to Leonardo in private collections are by him.... Young Bazzi while at Milan seems to have taken Leonardo for his model, not only in art, but even in personal appearance and fancies. All his life he loved to play the cavalier, and, like Leonardo, always kept saddle-horses in his stable, and all kinds of queer animals in his house."[226] Vasari gives an amusing, though probably apocryphal, account of his excesses, and represents him as a lewd fellow of the baser sort, with whom no respectable person would have anything to do. But Raphael so respected Bazzi and his work that he introduced his portrait (erroneously called Perugino's) by the side of his own in his celebrated fresco of the "School of Athens." But at any rate Sodoma was a careless, jovial fellow—dividing his time between the studio and the stable; and when cash ran short or a horse ran wrong, he would meet his liabilities with a hastily dashed-off picture. This very Madonna may perhaps have paid off a racing debt.
"Sodoma," says a distinguished German critic, "had a poetic soul, full of glowing and deep feeling, a richly endowed creative mind, but no inclination for severe earnest work" (Jansen). His execution is unequal, but at his best he is one of the most attractive of all the Italian painters. No one will deny this who recalls the fresco, in the upper floor of the Farnesina Palace, of "The Marriage of Alexander and Roxana"—"one of the most enchanting pictures of the whole Renaissance," or who has studied the painter's work in the churches, the Gallery, and the Palazzo Publico of Siena. The figure of "St. Ansano" in the latter place may be taken as an example of the dignity which Sodoma was capable of imparting to his types. The "Christ bound to the Column" in the Siena gallery is a fine example of his power as a colourist and his command of pathetic expression; while in the figure of Eve in the "Limbo" in the same gallery, and in more than one Holy Family, we may see his innate sense of feminine beauty and grace. It is supposed that Sodoma went as a young man to Milan and there imbibed the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, but this theory (maintained by Morelli) of a close connection between Leonardo and Sodoma is not accepted by all critics. In 1501 he went to Siena, where, in the stagnation of the local school, he found ample openings for his abilities. To this period belong the series of frescoes representing the history of St. Benedict in the Convent of Monte Oliveto. In 1507 Sodoma was taken by the Sienese merchant, Agostino Chigi, to Rome. He began to decorate the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican, but the Pope transferred the commission to Raphael. Sodoma was again in Rome in 1514, when he painted for Chigi the frescoes already referred to. In the interval he had returned to Siena, where he married the daughter of an innkeeper. From 1515 onwards he made Siena his headquarters. Copies of some of the works mentioned above may be seen in the Arundel Society's Collection.
This picture, which is hardly a satisfactory example of the painter, is one of those supposed by some critics to have been painted in the years 1518-20, during which he is believed to have revisited Milan. Others place it later in the artist's career. "Probably one of his late 'pot-boilers.' It was originally in the Rossini Collection at Pisa, and may have been painted there during the last years of the artist's life, while he was working at the choir decorations in the cathedral" (Sodoma, by the Contessa Priuli Bon, 1900, p. 92).