SODOMA, IL (1477-1549), the name given to the Italian painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. He was born at Vercelli in Lom bardy in 1477. His first master was Martino Spanzotto, by whom one signed picture is known. Acquiring thus the strong colouring and other distinctive marks of the Lombard school, he was brought to Siena in 1501 by some agents of the Spannocchi family; and, as the bulk of his professional life was passed in this Tuscan city, he counts as a member of the Sienese school, although not affined to it in point of style. He does not seem to have been a student in Siena, apart from some attention which he bestowed upon the sculptures of Jacopo della Quercia. With Pinturicchio, he was one of the first to establish there the matured style of the Cinquecento. His earliest works of repute are a series of 31 paint ings executed from 1505 to 1508 in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, on the road from Siena to Rome, illustrating the life of St. Benedict, in continuation of the series which Luca Signorelli had begun in 1498. Hence he was invited to Rome by the celebrated Sienese merchant Agostino Chigi, and was em ployed by Pope Julius II. in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. He executed two great compositions and various orna ments and grotesques. The latter are still extant; but the larger works did not satisfy the pope, who engaged Raphael to substi tute his "Justice," "Poetry" and "Theology." In the Villa Far nesina Bazzi painted some frescoes; "Alexander in the Tent of Darius" and the "Nuptials of the Conqueror with Roxana" (by some considered his masterpiece) are more particularly noticed.
Bazzi afterwards returned to Siena and later went in quest of work to Pisa, Volterra and Lucca. From Lucca he returned to Siena, not long before his death, which took place on Feb. 14, 1549. He had squandered his property and is said (rather dubi ously) to have died in penury in the great hospital of Siena.
It is uncertain whether Bazzi was a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, though Morelli (in his Italian Pictures in German Galleries) speaks of his having "only ripened into an artist during the two years (1498-150o) he spent at Milan with Leonardo"; and some critics see in Bazzi's "Madonna" in the Brera (if it is really by Bazzi) the direct influence of this master.
His most celebrated works are in Siena. In S. Domenico, in the chapel of St. Catherine of Siena, are two frescoes painted in 1526, showing Catherine in ecstasy, and fainting as she is about to re ceive the Eucharist from an angel—a beautiful and pathetic treatment. In the oratory of S. Bernardino, scenes from the his tory of the Madonna—the "Visitation" (1518) and the "Assump tion" (I532)—are noticeable. In the Academy are the "Deposi tion from the Cross" (1513) and "Christ Scourged"; by many critics one or other of these paintings is regarded as Bazzi's master piece. In the choir of the cathedral at Pisa is the "Sacrifice of Abraham," and in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence a "St. Sebastien." See Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, by Robert H. Hobart Cust (1906), which contains a full bibliography.