One of the greatest eccentrics of his era, Giovanni Bazzi enjoyed a unique nickname in the history of the Renaissance
How many artistic lives are concentrated in the story of the most globetrotting and multifaceted Piedmontese painter of the Renaissance, the Vercelli native Giovanni Antonio Bazzi known as Sodoma (1477 – 1549), to whose early career especially the Accorsi-Ometto Foundation of Turin dedicates one of the most inviting monographic exhibitions of the summer, including around fifty works by other contemporary artists (curated by Serena D’Italia, Luca Mana and Vittorio Natale, until 6 September).
A nickname, that of Sodom, which has not left posterity indifferent, due to the sexual vice for the evil Vasari, to macariesche – in the sense of the Turin comedian Erminio Macario, very popular in my father’s time – contortions from the Piedmontese dialect (“su, andùma!”) for the twentieth century Enzo Carli, but of which the person concerned, remembered by his contemporaries for his penchant for joking, was not ashamed at all. A pupil between Vercelli and Casale of Martino Spanzotti, an astute local mediator between the Flemish-Provençal, Lombard and Ferrarese influences, Sodoma moved at the end of the fifteenth century to the Milan of Leonardo and his men, finding there a favorable observatory from which to learn more about the developments of the national Renaissance than he could ever have done in Piedmont. Despite the relevance of the juxtaposition with a golden plaque by Galeazzo Moderno, the Pietà of the Archconfraternity of Santa Maria dell’Orto in Rome, where Sodom arrived for the first time in 1497, is a work that in the relaxation of the inanimate body, surrounded by angels, one of which with the typical Leonardesque smile, could not help but bring to mind the Berlin Pietà by Giovanni Bellini.
The study of the conjunction between Bellini and Mantegna is perhaps also at the basis of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in which Sodoma compares himself with the famous “scurto” of Brera without however approaching his perspective virtuosity, given that the corpse looks like that of a dwarf compared to the size of the bystanders. The “scurto” may have been known to Sodoma directly in Mantua, of which he also knew, as demonstrated in the still uncertain frescoes of the church of San Francesco in Subiaco, the illusionistic oculus of the Camera picta in the Palazzo Ducale. In the meantime, the expulsion of Ludovico il Moro by the French had convinced Leonardo and his companions to change scenery. So Sodoma moved to a completely different Italy, to a Siena that had been undermined by Renaissance Florence also in art, but which ours contributed to relaunching in the most enlightened, chameleon-like of Umbrian-Tuscan styles, although not forgetful of expressive frankness, more in line with the taste of Northern Italy, which the nuance knows how to lighten in the right amount. The Sodoma of this first Sienese season is to be sought outside of museums, given that he tries his hand at the most virile of paintings, the fresco, in tests which from 1503 see him maneuvering in the monastery of Sant’Anna a Camprena, near Pienza, citing the Roman archaeological remains as evidence of antiquarian culture while referring to the pictorial paradigm which is having the greatest impact between Florence and Rome, that of Perugino; then, from 1505, in the superb Benedictine cycle of the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, near Asciano, in which, taking over from a master of the caliber of Luca Signorelli, he shows all his maturity achieved in combining the previous Leonardesque ancestry with the appendix of Peruginism which established itself most in Siena, the serene, golden elegance of Pinturicchio which already the new Raphaelesque course, who knows if sensed by Bazzi since this period, he was overriding it in the name of a more complete artistic ideal.
No artist in early sixteenth-century Siena could have ignored the excellence of what he painted in Asciano. But Sodoma, who also raises his family in Siena, is already aiming for the city that the popes have also made holy in art, fitting in well with the other Sienese – the Chigi, the most munificent patrons; Baldassarre Peruzzi, a universal artist like few others – who were leaving their mark in those parts. It is a decisive moment for his success which sees him establish himself as a fresco painter of grotesques and other ancient decorations in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, where he is also forced to soon bow his head before the new protégé of Pope Julius II and the very rich banker “of God” Agostino Chigi, who is followed, after an unsatisfactory trip to Florence, by the most demanding, overflowing Stories of Alessandro at the Farnesina, Agostino’s villa created to be the most sumptuous in Rome.
In the wake of Raphael, Sodoma recovers a certain northern sense of plasticity, despite always keeping the temptation for overabundance around the corner, sacrificing Pinturicchio’s affectations without suffering too much, with the ancient Spanzottian halos and Leonardesque graces which show that they reflect the new classicist climate imposed by Sanzio (Holy Family of the Burgundy Museum in Vercelli, c.1511). At the same time, however, he does not give up the luxuriant flair of someone who feels free to draw from his hat digressions of even pagan sensuality that are a precursor to Mannerism, as happens in the more self-confident and upright Lucrezia from the Galleria Sabauda (c. 1516), a subject that earned him a knighthood on the initiative of the new Pope Leo one from the other, closing an era, Sodoma resettled in his Siena where he would reside until his last, continuing to dedicate himself intensely to the specialty of the house, frescoing from the Oratory of San Bernardino to the Caterini cycle in San Domenico, from the Palazzo Pubblico, where he worked on several occasions, to the Spanish Chapel in Santo Spirito.
Always with an extremely mannerist unscrupulousness, Gascon even when age inexorably advances, of someone who knows how to handle everything with robustness without ever weighing too much even when one runs the risk. We seem to see him in the face, he who in Asciano had wanted to portray himself as a wealthy braggart, and then in the Jewish features, however nobly Michelangelesque, of the most infamous of men, Judas, looking at us splendidly, in an expression between mocking and resigned, from the ruined Cenacle of the Florentine church of San Bartolomeo in Monteoliveto (ca. 1515-16), according to Vasari “bullied and mocked for his madness” due to alleged insufficiencies in his studies. If this is madness, it belongs only to the best art.
