Sodoma
9781613105238
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Sodoma, as he is more commonly called, is one of the most interesting of that large group of lesser-known artists, who helped to make the Renaissance the widespread and penetrating movement which it became. To the lights of the first magnitude belong the honours of the pioneer; great Raphael, greater Angelo, and mysterious Leonardo, forming, each along strongly individual and vital lines, the basis of a great artistic tradition. Following hard upon these men comes a group of whom Andrea del Sarto and Giovanni Antonio Bazzi are perhaps most fully representative; artists to whom originality of a pronounced kind was not lacking, but in whom a certain over-sensibility, a division of the soul between faithful adherence to the art-ideal and the spell of the world, lay at the root of their partial success. Yet it is certainly around these men, whose whole life was neither great nor successful, and whose work was, for the most part, but the patient toil of the skilled craftsman, but who, none the less, at some rare crises in their lives stepped forth from the ranks of the commonplace and wrought work worthy of the greatest, that the human interest centres. The peculiar attraction belonging to Sodoma lies, not so much in what he actually achieved as in what he might have done—the promise in him of great power only occasionally fulfilled. His masterworks, the “Christ bound to the Column” of the Siena Gallery, “The Vision of St. Catherine” in the church of San Domenico, and the marvellous “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” which hangs in the Uffizi, claim for him a place among the masters of his time, yet the vast bulk of his frescoes, hastily drawn, lacking in composition, and often heavily coloured, can only be accounted as of second-rate merit. In view of these defects it was perhaps excusable that the public of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ignored him; but it overlooked his great gifts as a psychologist and his immense insight at certain moments, into the deeper springs of human emotion. One cannot say that this insight was perpetual, or that it was always given to him to be the interpreter of the intenser motives which actuate mankind. The outer life of the man was not of a nature to foster such intuition, and little by little it left him, as with age his hand waxed feebler and his capacity for noble enthusiasm cooled. For information as regards his biography we owe a good deal to quite modern research. Vasari, never very accurate in his statements concerning artists of other than the Tuscan School, disliked Sodoma personally, and in the first edition of his famous “Lives” omitted him altogether. After the painter’s death he inserted a short sketch of his career, in which he not only vilified his personal character, but in many cases spoke disparagingly of his value as a painter. Sodoma was, however, held in high esteem by other artists. Raphael, as we know, not only refused to destroy his ceiling decorations in the Camera della Segnatura, but introduced his portrait into the “School of Athens” side by side with his own. Annibale Carracci, when he passed through Siena, was greatly struck with the quality of Sodoma’s work, and is said to have remarked, “Bazzi appears a very eminent master of the greatest caste, and few such pictures are to be seen.” Leo X. gave him the title of Cavalliere di Cristo, and the Emperor Charles V. created him Count Palatine. He had Agostino Chigi and the Prince of Piombino for his patrons, and the Signoria of Siena employed him on the most important public works. Beccafumi left the Roman schools and went to Siena in order to study under Sodoma, and his drawings were prized by artists of greater repute. Of his early life and the artistic influences which moulded him, Vasari, who was his contemporary, tells us nothing, Lomazzo ignores him altogether, and Padre Della Valle, who commentated the Siena edition of Vasari, had but scant materials upon which to work.
