Il Sodoma was the name given to the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi.
11 Facts About Il Sodoma
2.
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.
3.
Il 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.
4.
Il Sodoma executed two great compositions and various ornaments and grotesques in vaulted ceilings divided in feigned compartments in the antique manner that Pinturicchio had recently revived, working at the same time as Raphael.
5.
Il Sodoma's painting at this time began to show distinct Florentine influences, especially of Fra Bartolommeo.
6.
When Leo X became pope, Il Sodoma presented him with a picture of the Death of Lucretia.
7.
Il Sodoma had supposedly squandered his property and is said, without documentary support, to have died in penury in the great hospital of Siena.
8.
Il Sodoma dressed gaudily, like a mountebank, and his house was a Noah's ark, owing to the strange miscellany of animals he kept there.
9.
Il Sodoma was a cracker of jokes and fond of music, and he sang poems composed by himself on indecorous subjects.
10.
Vasari alleges that Il Sodoma was always a negligent artist, his early success in Siena, where he painted many portraits, being partly due to lack of competition, a judgment in which Sydney Freedberg concurs.
11.
Vasari nevertheless admits that Il Sodoma produced some works of very fine quality and that during his lifetime his reputation was high.