[i]

The Great Masters
in Painting and Sculpture
Edited by G. C. Williamson

[iv]

[v]

BY THE

CONTESSA PRIULI-BON

LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1900

HIS ORIGIN AND EARLY LIFE

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[2] 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[3] 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.”[1]

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.

It was not until within recent years that Italian scholars began consulting the Archives, and a certain Barnabite father, Don Luigi Bruzza, made some valuable discoveries concerning all that pertains to Sodoma’s early life at Vercelli.

[4]

He is thus found to have been the son of one Giacomo di Antonio dei Bazzi, a shoemaker of Briandate, who established himself at Vercelli, in Piedmont, somewhere about 1475, as shown on an act of that date.[2]

In 1476 the shoemaker married a certain Angelina of Pergamo (Bergamo), and it is believed that their eldest son, Giovanni Antonio, was born in the following year. Vasari says that he died in 1554, at the age of seventy-five, in which case he would have been born in 1479, but in both the date of his death and his age at the time, Vasari is now believed to be incorrect. Baldinucci thought that he might have been born about 1479, because, in his portrait at Monte Oliveto, painted during 1504, he appears to be about twenty-five years of age.[3] Among modern historians, Milanesi, not finding any definite entry concerning his birth, hazarded the theory that it might have taken place in 1474.[4]

Bruzza, however, argues the point as follows:[5] in the father’s will, dated August 13th, 1497, Giovanni Antonio is mentioned before his brother Niccola or his sister Amadea, which would point to his being the eldest. He must have still been under age in 1502 (twenty-five was the age in Piedmont at which a man attained his majority) for in another document Angelina, the mother, is named as guardian of all the three children, while in an act of August 2nd, 1503, the younger[5] brother Niccola, was the only one mentioned as being still under tutelage. Giovanni Antonio, therefore, probably reached his majority between January 1502 and August 1503.

Thus Don Luigi Bruzza establishes the date of his birth. As to his birthplace there need have been no confusion, for, though Vasari only speaks of Vercelli, without giving the province, he refers to that “warm and vivid colouring which he had brought with him from Lombardy.” The sixteenth-century writers, Tizio, Giovio, and Armenini, all refer to him as a Piedmontese, and it was not until 1649 that any doubt was thrown upon the whereabouts of Vercelli, and then a Siennese priest and littérateur, Isidoro Ugurgieri-Azzolini, who was compiling a curious little book called Le Pompe Sanesi, a series of short biographies of all the notable men of his town, was filled with a burning desire to rank the distinguished painter among the children of Siena, and solemnly spoke of him as “certainly born at Vergelle, a little castle in the province of Siena, sixteen miles from the city.”[6]

Della Valle, however, in his famous Lettere Senesi printed in 1786, rather sneers at Ugurgieri’s narrow patriotism, and quotes the manuscript of an earlier writer, Lanzi by name, who described the painter as “Giovanni Antonio, called Sodoma, by birth of Vercelli in Piedmont, and by education, establishment, and dwelling, Siennese.”[7]

In that same entry, which led Ugurgieri’s into a mistaken theory concerning his birth, was a misspelling[6] or a careless writing of the family name, and the worthy father, instead of Bazzi, read Razzi, an error which was copied by Lanzi and other writers, and is still perpetuated by the directors of some of the galleries at the present day.

Milanesi, however, discovered three entries in the Siena Archives which agree in their spelling of the name with the Vercelli documents alluded to above. A fourth entry, however, carries some confusion with it, for there we read, “Misser Giovannantonio dei Tizioni, detto il Sodoma, pittore da Verzé.”

Milanesi argued from this that the father might possibly have belonged to the house of the Tizioni, nobles of Vercelli, and that he had changed his name when forced by poverty to adopt the trade of a shoemaker. Later on he abandoned that theory for Bruzza’s conclusion that it was out of mere vanity that Sodoma had added the name to his own. But to the Act of 1490 in which Giovanni Antonio was apprenticed to Spanzotti, Francesco, son of Agostino Tizio, was witness and referee, and we are of opinion that the Tizioni may have been patrons of the family, and that, following a frequent Italian custom, he sometimes used the surname of the noble house to which he was indebted. Bruzza found among the Acts of a certain notary of Vercelli an agreement[8] between the elder Bazzi, Giacomo, and a certain glass-painter, Martino Spanzotti, by which the former placed his son to an apprenticeship of seven years, and agreed to pay for his instruction during that time in all the branches of painting, on glass as well as wood, the sum of fifty Milanese florins.

[7]

Spanzotti’s works are rare, and his style stiff, highly finished, and elaborated with gold, for Sodoma’s first pictures after his arrival in Siena had traces of this older and gaunter manner. Padre della Valle finds in them a resemblance to the work of Giovanone, who flourished at Vercelli between 1513 and 1527, but we cannot be sure that the student fell under his influence.

The agreement with Spanzotti was dated November 20th, 1490, and as it held good for seven years we may infer that it was towards the end of 1497 that young Sodoma left his early home and the old glass-painter who had taught him how to draw, and started out into the world. But from 1497 to 1501 we have no real information concerning him, and first become acquainted with his work when already arrived at maturity and passing with rapid strides towards the full developments of his early middle period. Morelli conjectured that he went straight to Milan from Vercelli and studied there under the direct influence of Leonardo. Whether this was the case we have so far no means of ascertaining. Artistically, Sodoma certainly ranks among the Lombards, the whole tendency of his painting is more and more towards the Leonardesque. Admitting the theory of his having worked under the great Florentine, or at any rate of his having moved in the same circle at Milan, it would seem as if the influence of Leonardo had had but little effect upon him at the moment, but had borne its fruit by slow degrees. It was as if he had deliberately striven, in later years, to approach more and more to the manner which had deeply impressed him in early youth.

[8]

His first panels in Siena, the “Deposition” and the various tondi, are far more Tuscan in their composition and drawing than Lombardesque; in the Monte Oliveto frescoes the Lombard manner is more pronounced, and by the time he gets to Rome and decorates the Camera della Segnatura his artistic individuality is fully declared.

In any case Sodoma could not have been very many years in the Lombard capital, for in 1501 we find him working at Siena.[9] Vasari says that he was induced to go there by an agent of the Spanocchi, rich Siennese bankers and merchants, sons of that Ambrogio Spanocchi who built the family palace at Siena and was the trusted treasurer of Pius II.

Sodoma probably needed but little persuasion to accompany him; he was fond of change and travel, moreover the downfall and exile of Ludovico Sforza, and the placing of the city under French rule, had unsettled the whole of society, and men were less ready to spend their wealth on the decoration of palaces, or the painting of portraits, than on means of public and private defence. Leonardo, also, had left Milan and betaken himself to Venice on the downfall of the Sforza.

Siena offered the young painter exactly the field that he desired. It was at that moment without any native painters of merit, for the earlier school, founded on the principles of Giotto, had lost its vitality with the death of Bartolo di Fredi, fifty years before. It had been a school of intense refinement, the contemplative, tranquil thought, of the later Middle Ages,[9] when, the excitement of the Crusades at an end and the struggle of the Communes for independence virtually accomplished, Europe had settled down into a condition of contemplative industrial development. Florence and Milan had stepped beyond this stage. The delicacy of Fra Angelico had given place to the more vigorous, more dramatic, infinitely robuster arts of the Renaissance, and Michelangelo was already carrying vigour and passion to an extreme, until violent action and melodramatic sentiment came to be the rule in painting. But the artists of Siena had gone on in the old groove, and such school as lingered through the fifteenth century was without life or originality. One of the recent Popes had been a Siennese, Æneas-Silvius Piccolomini, humanist, man of letters, art patron, and priest, a man of contradictions, like many of his age, not quite certain whether to be wholly humanist or wholly ecclesiastic. It was to his memory that his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius III.) built the magnificent library attached to the cathedral and invited Pinturicchio in 1502 to paint the great decorative series of frescoes which were to illustrate the Pontiff’s life.

Pinturicchio was, however, middle-aged, and he worked in the earlier Umbrian manner which he had acquired from Perugino, nor had he the versatility to adapt himself to more modern requirements.

Sodoma, belonging to a younger generation, trained in a freer school, and more naturally ready to absorb the tendencies of the time, was the very man needed to give new life to the art-world of the place.

He seems to have painted a number of portraits[10] during those early years at Siena; he was exceedingly popular; he made a great deal of money, and he spent it lavishly, often on childish freaks.

Vasari was the authority for his extravagances, and it is probable that, disliking Sodoma personally as he did, he exaggerated the small eccentricities and unconventionalities of a wayward artistic disposition, keen in its love of sport and with the same passionate fondness for dumb animals as his great master, Leonardo.

“He amused himself,” says Vasari, “by keeping in his house all kinds of strange animals, badgers, squirrels, apes, cat-a-mountains, dwarf asses, and barbs to run races, Elban ponies, magpies, dwarf chickens, Indian doves, and other beasts of similar kind, in fact, whatever he could get hold of. And, besides these beasts, he had a crow, who had learnt from him how to talk so well that he imitated in many things the voice of Giovanni Antonio himself, particularly in replying to anyone who knocked at the door, as all the Siennese well know. In the same way, the other creatures were so tame that they were always round about him in the house, playing the strangest games and the maddest pranks in the world, so that his house seemed to be a veritable Noah’s Ark.”[10]

Della Valle tells us that his first production while in Siena was a panel picture of the Virgin nursing the divine Infant, which was placed above the little organ in the choir of San Francesco, and that it bore a great resemblance to one of the bas-reliefs done by Jacopo della Quercia on his fountain in the public square. This picture is now in the possession of Dr. Richter. Vasari broadly asserts that Sodoma made studies from Della[11] Quercia’s fountain, and it is not improbable that these studies were modelled, for later on we find his studio mentioned as being full of clay and plaster casts, and Riccio, his son-in-law, inherited a number of these casts from him.[11]

Two of his early panels were done for the Savini family. And the wood-carver, Antonio Barili—who also made the beautifully carved panelling for the Piccolomini Library was the author of the frames, inscribing on one of them his name and date—Anno Domini MCCCCCI. Antonio Barilis Senensis opus (sic).[12]

These panels had, however, already disappeared from Siena by 1786, when Della Valle wrote, but he quotes a description of them made by a previous writer, Alfonzo Landi, who says the first was “three braccia high and one-and-a-half wide, in which the Virgin is represented with majestic face and bearing, with her naked child in her arms, exceedingly delicate and tender. St. John the Baptist, an equally graceful child, is embraced by the Virgin’s right arm. In the upper part appears a head of St. Joseph, and with it a hand holding a vase. A picture of great value for its excellence.” This picture was in the possession of the Savini for a long time; the widow of the last representative of the house sold it to a foreigner for 120 scudi, and all traces of it are now lost.

Of the other picture Landi relates: “In it the Virgin is depicted seated with the nude Child upon her arm, who appears anxious to receive the homage[12] of St. John Baptist, also a child, who seems to worship the infant Christ with his hands crossed upon his breast. Above St. John Baptist is seen St. Catherine of Siena down to the waist, with the hands joined holding a lily, and opposite appears a head of St. Joseph.”

There was also in the church of St. Francesco another panel of “Our Lord bearing the Cross.” It was done for the Buonsignori family in 1506, and placed in the chapel of which they were the owners. Unfortunately it perished in the great fire which destroyed so large a portion of the building in 1655. For the Cinozzi chapel in the same church Sodoma painted a large altar-piece representing the “Descent from the Cross.” It is a fine painting of his early time, and was evidently thought much of by contemporary critics, for it was placed in the company of pieces by Raphael, Perugino, and Pinturicchio. Vasari, who, as we know, did not willingly praise Sodoma’s work, was forced, however, to write with admiration of the beautiful group of women supporting the Virgin, and the fine figure of the soldier with the carefully painted reflected lights on helmet and cuirass.

The composition of the picture is the conventional composition of the period. The Cross with its Hebrew inscription occupies the central foreground. A broad valley lies behind, bordered to the left by low blue hills, and a river of some width has carved its course across the plain, fringed with little castles and clumps of tufty trees. In the group of women so praised by Vasari we get for the first time a touch of Sodoma’s peculiar quality, the grace and tenderness in handling female forms for which he afterwards became so noted.

[13]

He repeated this group in one of the last pictures of his life, the “Pietà” in the choir of Pisa Cathedral, but it lacks the sentiment and the care of the Siena picture. Vasari speaks of this painting as having been undertaken after Sodoma’s return from Rome, which would have placed it later than the Monte Oliveto frescoes. Its technique, however, is in the hard and finished manner of his early years. It was while designing the frescoes of the Olivetan convent that he seems to have acquired that larger style in which breadth of treatment and flowing line became so characteristic. Milanesi and Frizzoni date the “Descent from the Cross” about 1502. The predella, consisting of five small scenes from the Passion, is roughly executed and evidently by a scholar’s hand.

It now hangs in the chief room of the Siena Gallery, and not far from it is a large tondo, or round panel, representing the “Nativity.” This is painted in tempera and glazed over with oil, and is in excellent preservation. The infant Christ is laid upon the hem of the Virgin’s blue mantle. She bends over Him with hands clasped in adoration, and immediately behind her kneels St. Joseph in a brilliant drapery of yellow, grasping his staff, while an angel with radiant wings kneels on the opposite side, holding the little St. John. This tondo was brought from Lecceto, a hermitage of ancient foundation twelve kilometres outside Porta San Marco, and apparently it gave satisfaction to those for whom it was painted, for we find a very similar composition, made by the master’s own hand, was for many years in the Scarpa collection at La Motta, in Friuli. It has now passed into the possession of Signor[14] Antonio Borgogna of Vercelli. Ignazio Fumagalli, in his Scuola di Leonardo da Vinci, has had this reproduction engraved and published under the name of a Cesare da Sesto. The painting of tondi, or circular panels was particularly in vogue among the Tuscan artists, and Sodoma appears, in this one, to have had some reminiscences in his mind of works which he had seen by Lorenzo di Credi. The broken brickwork, through which a glimpse of the landscape is seen, the slight, feathery trees, and the grouping of the figures are very Tuscan in their style, but the colouring, with its warm lights and transparent shadows is that which he learned in Lombardy. Vasari, speaking of Cesare da Sesto, tells us that he took lessons from one Bernazzano, a painter whose individual treatment of landscape was far more successful than that of figures. It is not improbable that many of the young men working in Milan during that epoch may have acquired their peculiar manner of landscape painting from this little-known master. The close resemblance between the backgrounds of Gianpietrino, Cesare da Sesto and Sodoma suggest a strong probability of their having been trained in this branch of art by the same teacher. Sodoma apparently made a number of these round pictures at this period. We can trace two of them which came from the Chigi palace at Siena. One is in Captain Holford’s possession, at Dorchester House, and represents a “Holy Family, with St. John and Two kneeling Angels”; the other is an allegorical composition in which two female figures surrounded by four young children may be intended as symbolic of Charity. This has passed, I believe, into the possession of Count[15] Bobriusky. Colonel Cornwall Legh has another tondo, in which St. Elizabeth also appears with the infant St. John.

In an inventory of Sodoma’s possessions taken at his death (February 15th, 1549), there is mention of a number of portraits, including those of a Saracini lady, another lady of the Toscani family, and of Pandolfo Petrucci, the would-be tyrant of Siena.

MONTE OLIVETO

We now come to that series of frescoes in the surrounding country, in which, as we have already noticed, Sodoma’s artistic personality seems to have first fully asserted itself. In 1503 he was given his first important commission, which was to paint in fresco the two end walls of the little convent of St. Anna in Creta, not far from San Quirico.[13] He received twenty golden scudi in return for the six large frescoes and the row of medallions which he left there. On the shorter wall, facing the entrance, are three scenes representing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The most important and the best preserved of these is the central one, containing the figure of Our Lord in white, with upraised fingers, blessing the five little loaves which a smiling child presents to Him. Behind these the group of apostles is densely packed; the row of heads all the same height stretches across two thirds of the fresco, giving a sense of congestion which Sodoma in his larger scenes evidently found it very difficult to avoid. It is a defect he shares in common with Luini, and it is noticeable, though to a less degree, in the fresco to the left, where one of the younger apostles is still offering bread to the already satiated crowd.

In both of these compartments there is a complicated[17] landscape background, a winding river, low hills with little towns, tall, feathery trees, such as one sees in spring in Umbria, and in the central scene a classical arch, evidently copied from some print or painting of Rome.

The third fresco on this wall is too badly damaged to be clearly seen, damp and neglect having done their work more or less in all of the series. Upon the entrance wall, above the door, is a “Pietà,” the dead Christ wept over by the Virgin, across whose knees He is stretched.

In the right hand fresco of this group Sodoma was possibly inspired by a remembrance of a design, which had been immensely worked upon, both by Leonardo himself and by his school, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne. But instead of placing the Virgin on the knees of St. Anne, as in Leonardo’s cartoon and in the works of all the other Lombard masters, Sodoma raised the Virgin’s mother upon a throne approached by steps, and seated upon these steps the young Mary with her Infant and two Olivetan brothers at the sides. The colour has peeled terribly, and the head of Christ is utterly defaced. This scene was enclosed under a painted portico of rich Renaissance design, which corresponds with that on the left, where stands St. Bernard, surrounded by six Olivetan brothers in their white robes. In the soffit of the doorway is a medallion enclosing a bust of Our Lord, and across the longer walls of the refectory runs a frieze containing little square scenes from the life of the Virgin in chiaro-oscuro, and round medallions of saints, that of Santa Scholastica being one of the best. This frieze is, however, almost destroyed by the damp.

[18]

The successful completion of these works led to his being employed on a far greater series, that of the cloister of Monte Oliveto. That important monastery had been founded on the ridge of a deep ravine in the very heart of the wild tract of country lying round Siena by Bernardo Tolomei, a young Siennese noble of devout tendencies, who had been shocked by the corruption among the Benedictine order and had instituted the reformed branch.

Luca Signorelli had been commissioned to illustrate the life of St. Benedict in a series of lunettes around the four walls of the cloister, but he had hardly finished nine of the series when he was called away in 1498 by the council of the cathedral of Orvieto, to line the lower part of the chapel of San Brizio with his dramatic presentation of the Four Last Things. The monks of Monte Oliveto were thus left with their convent walls unfinished, but the Abbot, one Domenico Airoldi, was from Lecco, on the Lake of Como, and Vasari says that Sodoma went out to the monastery to visit his fellow-Lombard. Whether he solicited the order or not, Frate Domenico appointed him to complete the series. He painted in all thirty-one frescoes, for which the rate of payment varied, according to the merit of the painting. He received altogether 241 ducats, about £62, and beside this remuneration in cash he was further rewarded by a rich suit of clothes, which had belonged to a Lombard gentleman who had recently entered the order. From a quaint entry in the Archives (quoted by Milanesi) we learn the details of which this dress consisted. “A cape, a doublet of velvet, a gabardine of black velvet, a pair of light purple[19] stockings, a black cap, a hat with a silken border, a felt riding-cloak, a pair of velvet boots, a sword, and two embroidered shirts.” In such attire Sodoma introduced his own portrait into the third fresco.

Besides the five-and-twenty frescoes in the cloister he painted sundry scenes about the corridors and landings. On the stairs leading to the dormitory he placed a very interesting “Coronation of the Virgin,” within a vesica. Christ is in mauve and red, bending forward to place the crown upon the Virgin’s brow, she being in white with a pale grey mantle. The face of Our Lord is particularly beautiful. Below is a pale landscape and the shield of the Olivetan order. On the wall of the archway leading from the church into the cloister is a fresco of “Christ bearing the Cross,” in which again the artist has remembered the traditions of his Lombard training. The figure is a three-quarter one, the face turned over the left shoulder. The flesh-tints are warm and vivid, and there is a good deal of hatching on the muscles. A purple drapery wraps the loins, and a soldier immediately behind Him strikes Him with a sword. This figure has a good deal of pathos, but perhaps there is more dignity in the fresco of “Christ bound to the Column” which faces it. This is but a variation of the theme which he treated so remarkably later on, and we may notice how invariably Sodoma succeeded when it was a question of portraying Our Lord under conditions of mental suffering. Here, too, He is almost nude, save for the pale muslin girth; the hands are bound behind Him to the flecked marble pillar; there is a light mauve sky behind, and faintly indicated green hills. On the opposite lintel is a fresco of San[20] Bernardo in the act of establishing the Olivetan order, over the door of the Father-General’s apartments is a “Madonna with St. Peter and St. Michael,” and on one of the staircases an inferior “Pietà.”

The frescoes in the cloister necessitated great breadth of treatment and a more monumental form of composition than anything he had yet done. It was the severest training that he could have, and should have brought out all his decorative faculties, but that he was hampered by the colourlessness of his subject.

The greater number of the scenes consisted of only the figures of white-robed monks, and Sodoma had to avoid the violent contrast which would have occurred had he laid on too vivid colour in these compartments where secular dress was introducible. The endless groups of white forms against white convent walls or the pale outlines of Roman hills could only become works of first-rate merit by virtue of some pronounced strength in their grouping, and, as we have already seen, composition was by no means Sodoma’s strongest point.

The earlier frescoes are, for this reason, perhaps the most interesting.

Vasari specially admired these at the four corners, St. Benedict setting out for Rome on his white charger, followed by his old nurse; the parents of St. Maurus and St. Placidus bringing their children to the saint, the introduction of the bad women into the convent, and the final burning of Monte Cassino by the victorious Goths. In all of these Sodoma permitted himself the use of deepened colour, and, probably being on that account more interested in the work, he attained a[21] greater success in the disposition and general treatment.

Throughout the whole series there are many single heads of striking power, for instance, St. Benedict reproving the truant monk in No. 13, and the stern, concentrated face of the mason building the wall in No. 24.

There are some graceful women’s types in No. 19, one of the few frescoes in which female forms appear. It represents the attempt of the wicked Fiorenzo to seduce the monks by introducing a score of women of doubtful character within the convent walls. Sodoma, probably weary in his artistic soul of treating the eternal white dresses of the brothers, and delighted to get a chance of drawing nude figures, put in some of these women undraped. With what grace and tenderness he could handle the female form we may judge from his Eve in the “Descent into Hades,” or the various studies for the Leda (considered a copy by Dr. Richter) of the Borghese Gallery.

His fresco of “Christ bound to the Column” in the Siena Gallery, and the famous “St. Sebastian” of the Uffizi, as well as the sundry drawings he has left of studies for dead Christs, not only attest to a great knowledge of anatomy but to a sentiment of the beauty and divineness of the human form which is almost Greek in spirit.

The monks, however, not quite able to comprehend the painter’s serene delight in the pure outlines of human limb and muscle, insisted on having the figures draped, and Sodoma was set to alter his own work.

But the grace of these figures is apparent through their draperies, and the combination of colour most[22] harmonious. Behind them is a graceful loggia, a classical arch and colonnade in the centre, and to the left St. Benedict leans over a balcony to exhort them.

The first fresco of all, where St. Benedict leaves the paternal roof, is a very charming one. The young saint in blue robe and flying orange mantle, is mounted upon a rearing white horse. Behind him his nurse in pink, follows more sedately upon an ass. To the left stands the father in cap and gown of red, and the young mother in stately black garb, leading the tiny sister by the hand. There are not too many figures here to confuse the eye, and the colouring is most delicate. In the middle distance, to the right, rises the town of Norcia, rich in towers and battlements.

In all of these outdoor scenes, Sodoma has obviously taken pleasure in the landscape, and we see, too, that on every possible opportunity he had been happy to introduce animals into the groups. In No. 3, the episode of the broken sieve, he has painted his own portrait in the figure of the tall youth just outside the door. He has on the gaudy clothes, the marvellous yellow mantle and red stockings, of the Milanese who had become a monk. But he could not paint his own likeness without that of his constant companions, the pet crow, whom he had taught to speak, and the two badgers, and the goose and great white swan, in the background.

Under each of these frescoes he painted two medallions, containing fancy portraits of the various generals of the order, the only genuine one being that of Fra Domenico of Lecco. But these getting spoiled in the course of time and the eyes effaced, Fra Antonio Bentivoglio of Bologna had them washed out altogether.

[23]

The series finished, Sodoma found himself back again at Siena, surrounded by his badgers, and his marmosets, and all that herd of animal life which Vasari despised him so for keeping.

Possibly at this time, too, was painted that much-disputed female portrait at the Städel Institute, Frankfort, over which the old and the modern school of criticism still wages a lively war.

Dr. Bode, in his Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft,[14] believes it to be a northern production, and has attributed it to the Flemish painter, Jan Scorel.

The compilers of the official catalogue of the gallery, acknowledging in it somewhat of the Italian manner, have, at any rate, granted it to be by Sebastiano del Piombo. It was Signor Morelli who first proclaimed it to be a genuine work of Sodoma, a portrait, probably, of some young Siennese gentlewoman, decked out in the jewellery of hand-wrought gold, in which the descendants of the Etruscan race yet preserve their hereditary skill.

Morelli draws our attention to the following characteristics, and as we shall find them repeated in most of his work it may not be superfluous to enumerate them here:

ROME

It is certain that Sodoma left Monte Oliveto more fully in possession of his faculties as an artist than when he went there. He had left the mediæval manner behind him, and might now take rank among the moderns. He is entirely modern in the fresco in the Vatican, which is the next work which we can trace.

In 1507 there arrived in Siena, Agostino Chigi, treasurer to Julius II., rich beyond the dreams of avarice, extravagant beyond the limits of good taste. Of him it is related that, after each banquet given to the Pope at his villa in Trastevere, the whole dinner-service, whether of silver or not, was cast with the refuse into the Tiber. He possessed the duty on salt, and the alum-pits of the Papal States, and drew from them some 70,000 ducats annually.

Rome was just then the seat of very considerable artistic activity. Perugino had been set by Sixtus IV., to decorate, in company with Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Signorelli, the walls of the Sistine Chapel, and Pinturicchio, commanded by Alexander VI. to paint the Borgia chambers. Julius II. who now ascended the Pontifical chair was furthermore connected with the ducal house of Urbino, a centre of courtly culture, where connoisseurship in art ranked as a necessary qualification. His was the ambition, not only to[27] extend the temporal power, but to render the Eternal City as beautiful through works of art as Augustus had done through the acquisition of valuable marble. Michelangelo was now bidden leave his colossal tomb and commence the ceiling of the Sistine, and the leading artists of the day were employed on the Vatican chambers.

Sodoma, taken to Rome by Chigi, and perhaps further recommended by Bramantino, whom he had known in Milan,[15] was now commanded to paint the walls and ceiling of the Camera della Segnatura. The octagon in the middle of the ceiling, wherein bounding cherubs are shown in every possible attitude giving full play to all his power in foreshortening, is, in every sense, a work of the later Renaissance, intrinsically contemporary with the medallions put there later on by Raphael. He had, as we have seen, been commissioned to decorate the whole chamber, and his are the Arabesques which form a framework to the four famous symbolic figures. His, too, are the eight little scenes in grisaille which fill up the spaces between the medallions, scenes which have not perhaps very great individual merit, but which take their place adequately in the general decorative scheme, and once formed a background to the four figures painted there by Sodoma himself. Vasari says that it was the artist’s own inattention and idleness which caused the Pope to have them obliterated, and Raphael set to paint his allegories in their stead. It is equally probable that the change came about from a desire for artistic harmony, and that the principal pictorial elements in[28] the ceiling should be done by the same hand which had decorated the walls. Raphael, however, with the eye of a genuine artist, saw that Sodoma’s work was good, and he contrived to leave intact the central fresco and the decorative panels in grisaille. Raphael further painted Sodoma’s portrait next his own in the “School of Athens.” The man in white, with white head-gear, is now admitted to be not Perugino, as formerly supposed, who was a very much older man at the time, but the young author of the ceiling ornament.[16]

Curiously enough, this central space, with its foreshortened and fleshy cherubs sustaining the Della Rovere coat-of-arms, has been attributed, by a German school of critics, to Melozzo da Forlì, an opinion which existing documents disprove,[17] and which the internal evidence of technique should be sufficient to disperse. The grounds for this curious theory seem to consist chiefly in the fact that Sixtus IV., who called Melozzo da Forlì to Rome, was a Della Rovere, and that the coat-of-arms refers to him, and not to Julius.

Another work which is attributed to Sodoma, and also assigned by Morelli to this epoch, that of his first Roman visit, is the little panel in the Brera, No. 14515. A very sweet-faced and distinctly Lombard Madonna is seated upon a bank where columbine and wild parsley spring. Behind her a field stretches away to the river, which flows from a limpid lake. The lake is[29] bounded by transparent, bluish mountains, rendered more blue and more transparent by the flaming sunset light. The artist was evidently impressed by the gorgeous natural colouring, and has concentrated himself upon a study in tone, gemlike and brilliant, further enhanced by the quality of the wood on which it was painted.

The shadows are all clear and transparent, and the modelling of the Virgin’s face very delicately done. This picture was in a private collection somewhere in Germany, and was put up for sale in 1890 at a public auction at Cologne. Signor Morelli adjudged it to be by Sodoma and persuaded Herr Habich of Cassel to purchase it. It was afterwards bought by the directors of the Brera Gallery, and now hangs in the same room as Raphael’s “Sposalizio.” It has all the touches characteristic of Sodoma in his extremely Lombard period, an exaggeration almost of the manner of Leonardo and Luini. Despite the clearness of its shadows, which Morelli takes to be a sign of Sodoma’s early work, we should be more inclined to assign it to a later period, perhaps that of the Borghese “Leda,” and the smaller “Madonna” of Turin.

What became of Sodoma after his dismissal from Rome is uncertain. He probably returned to Siena with Agostino Chigi, and in the October of 1510, he married the daughter of the prosperous Luca Galli, landlord of the “Crown and Goose.” Milanesi found among the archives an entry concerning her dowry, which was not inconsiderable, reaching, as it did, the sum of 450 florins.[18]

[30]

In 1511 was born his only son Apelles, to whom the painter Genga stood godfather. Apelles died in infancy, and the following year saw the birth of a daughter, Faustina, who afterwards married her father’s pupil Bartolommeo Neroni, commonly known as Riccio.

Vasari makes some allusions to domestic unhappiness and says that his wife finally left him and supported herself, but we can find no other authority to this statement. In 1531 and 1541 she was still living with her husband, and if it be true, as Vasari says, that when old “he had nothing to live upon, and no one to take care of him,” it was probably because his wife was dead.

He was evidently doing well, for in June 1511 he threw into prison Vincenzo Tamagni, another painter, who owed him a sum of twenty-five golden ducats,[19] and in 1513 he ran three horses in the Palio, the annual race which still takes place in the public square of Siena during the month of August.

One of these horses he apparently bought from Agostino dei Bardi, for Milanesi found among the archives a notice to the effect that, “on the 9th of November 1513 Johannis Antonius Jacobe dei Verzé di Savoia, having had a horse from Messer Agostino dei Bardi, valued at thirty golden ducats, undertook to paint, within the space of eight months, either the façade of his house, or a panel for an altar-piece, as he should choose.”[20] Another entry gives the names and description of these same horses run by the fashionable[31] painter. Bardi chose the decoration of his house-front, a sign significant of the growing Renaissance spirit, but even during Vasari’s lifetime the fresco was peeling, and has now entirely disappeared. There is a large altar-piece, done originally for a church at Colle in Val D’Elsa, which, in spite of the audacious restoration which has almost obscured the distinctive character of Sodoma’s work, is assigned by Dr. Frizzoni to this epoch. It represents the Virgin and Child upon a high marble throne, two flying angels hold back the curtains of the canopy, and below are a group of four saints, Lucy, Catharine of Alexandria, Jerome, and John.

It was bought by the Turin Gallery for 1200 scudi from Cav. Rosselli del Turco of Florence.

Frizzoni says: “This is a work meriting particular attention for its uncommon merits, so much so that one may believe it to have been executed in a moment of fortunate inspiration and in the full power of his faculties.”[21]

The fresco of St. Ives, on the wall of the prison chapel at San Gemignano was executed during 1507, most probably before his visit to Rome. He received the commission from Giovanni Battista Macchiavelli, who was then Podestà,[22] but apparently it was done in a hurry, as a kind of artistic parenthesis. It still exists, though considerably damaged, and we can distinguish within the larger of its divisions—for Sodoma again carried out the portico idea so much in vogue at Siena—St. Ives standing among a crowd of clients[32] to whom he administers justice. Two fat putti, now hardly traceable, stand in the foreground, holding the Macchiavelli escutcheon. In 1513 he was paid 142 lire by the commune of San Gemignano for another fresco, that of the Madonna enthroned between San Gemignano and St. Nicholas of Bari. This fresco was on the wall of a loggia facing the church of the Collegiata, but with the action of frost and rain the colour has almost left it and very little but the outline remains. The two putti, flying above the Virgin’s head, are still in fair preservation.[23]

Between 1513 and 1515, when we find him again in Siena, Sodoma is believed to have been at Rome, this time in the actual service of Agostino Chigi, who was about to marry Leonora, the daughter of Girolamo Piccolomini. He had erected for his private dwelling the palace on the right bank of the Tiber, now called the Farnesina. Whether this fine piece of architecture be the work of Baldassare Peruzzi or of Raphael is somewhat uncertain. At any rate Chigi employed the greatest artists of the day upon its interior decoration; Raphael designed the myth of Psyche for the ground floor hall, Peruzzi painted the ceiling of a smaller room, Sebastian del Piombo and Michelangelo left frescoes upon various walls.

The palace was certainly built and partially decorated by 1510, and most authorities are agreed that it was between the years 1513 and 1515, when he was back in Siena, that Sodoma paid his second visit to the capital, and that the Farnesina frescoes are not, as Vasari asserted,[33] contemporaneous with his ceiling in the Vatican.[24] In Chigi’s house he enjoyed the most brilliant society, that of the leading artists and some of the most notable men of letters of the day. Leonardo was in Rome at the time, and with Pietro Aretino Sodoma contracted a friendship which lasted into old age. There is, among Aretino’s published letters, one addressed to Sodoma,[25] in which he speaks of the “cordial affection of love with which we were wont to embrace when Rome and the house of Agostino Chigi so delighted us that we should have been furious with anyone who had ventured to tell us that we could exist an hour without one another.”

To Sodoma was allotted the task of painting, in the upper storey, certain scenes from the life of Alexander the Great, his conquest of Darius and his marriage with Roxana.

The Roxana scene is about twice as long as it is high, filled with architectural details, of which the bride’s couch, with its heavily carved columns and cornices, is the most conspicuous portion.

An open loggia to the right, with polished marble columns, gives ample opportunity for displaying his knowledge of perspective, and beyond these is a landscape of a hill-town, a winding river, and an old bridge.

To the left is Roxana’s couch, on which she is seated, while three winged putti pull off her sandals and assist her with her toilet. Behind her two female attendants and a negro bring ewers of water. Alexander stands[34] before the couch, offering his royal crown to his bride, and two tall figures, probably Hephæstion and Hymen, for one of them bears a torch, stand under the colonnade. On the ground beside them, in the roof of the loggia and above Roxana’s couch, fly putti in every attitude of jubilant exaltation.

There are a good many drawings for this fresco scattered about Europe, and nearly all of them have been attributed to Raphael, probably because he was known to have treated the subject in much the same manner. Both he and Sodoma based their composition about a classical description of an antique painting by Aetion.

There is a pen and ink drawing in the Uffizi (No. 1479), in which Roxana is seated nude upon her couch, while one of the putti takes off her sandals and another unpins her veil. This has a signature, now believed to be a forgery, de Rafel da Urbin. Another version of the same group is in the Albertina at Vienna, once believed to be Raphael’s, but now officially recognised as being by Sodoma, and there is a pen and ink study in the Esterhazy collection at Buda Pesth, for the figure of Roxana standing. This has also been finally identified as Sodoma’s.

The Christ Church Library, Oxford, has a rough sketch for Roxana’s couch, where three wingless putti trail festoons of flowers about the baldacchino. Sir J. C. Robinson, in his Critical Account of the Drawings of Michelangelo and Raffaello in the University Galleries,[26] refuses to see in this study any resemblance to the style of Raphael, and classes it among the unknown drawings[35] of the early part of the sixteenth century, and most probably as Baccio Bandinelli’s. Passavant puts it down to “the school of Raphael.” Morelli and Frizzoni consider it a genuine Sodoma.

On the opposite wall we have Alexander receiving the vanquished family of Darius. This fresco is full of figures, and has his usual defect of nearly all the heads being on the same level. Under a tent, attached to the branches of neighbouring trees, the conqueror stands, while before him, with outstretched arms, the mother of the fallen Persian bows before him, and behind her follow the wife and children, and a number of women servants. Behind Alexander a group of armed men wait at a little distance. A portion of the bridge spanning a river, and a feathery tree, carry the eye into the background.

In both of these frescoes we find the Lombard manner more and more, and the fact that Leonardo was himself in Rome at this time may serve to explain it. Side by side with this tendency, however, we find a more or less direct imitation of Raphael. His drawings for the Roxana fresco have a good deal of the “round” manner of that master, and it is not without a good show of reason, that they have in most cases been attributed to him. Naturally, the broader style of painting introduced by the great innovator of the fifteenth century, was bound to affect the whole art-world, but in Sodoma’s case direct imitation of him is to be traced but in a few things, and Raphael’s influence does not appear to have been a permanent one. Curiously enough, though in Rome at the very moment when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, and probably moving in the same social circle, Sodoma was[36] careful not to allow himself to be in any way drawn into the circle of his influence, and though we occasionally find reminiscences of Raphael in his later work—the frescoes in San Bernardino and the “Birth of the Virgin” in the Carmine—there is nothing among his works to remind us that he ever saw a painting of Buonarotti.

The third fresco in the Farnesina, that of Vulcan bending over the fire to forge his arrows, was for a long time unauthenticated, but Frizzoni believes it to be also by Sodoma, an opinion not shared by other critics. Another fresco, on the fourth wall of this room, representing the young Alexander breaking in Bucephalus, much defaced by restoration, is claimed by Kugler as Sodoma’s, and Frizzoni claims for him the whole cycle. During this, his second Roman visit, he must have painted the panel in the Spada Gallery representing “St. Christopher carrying the infant Christ.” There is a rough sketch for this among the drawings in the Uffizi, in red chalk, No. 1986, and another, more finished, of the Morelli collection at Bergamo.

Prince Mario Chigi has a small, highly-coloured panel filled with struggling figures. It had been greatly retouched, and a few years ago the upper coats of paint were carefully removed, revealing the original work, which Morelli unhesitatingly ascribed to Sodoma. It is obviously an episode from Roman history, and has been called the “Rape of the Sabines,” but Frizzoni thinks it more probably the picture referred to in the inventory quoted by Della Valle,[27] in which an unknown citizen of Siena catalogues, among the pictures left him by his father—

[37]

“A picture by Sodoma, representing Numitor, who condemns the mother of Romulus and Remus to death with her children—scudi 100.”

There is a vulgar pen and ink sketch in the Uffizi, unsigned, which is attributed to Sodoma, and is believed to be a study for this panel.

About this time Signor Morelli believes him to have painted the original of the “Leda,” No. 434, in the Borghese Gallery. This panel was for a long time thought to be by Leonardo until Morelli, finding many drawings for it in the different European galleries, which he unhesitatingly ascribed to Sodoma, concluded that this was the picture for which these studies had been made. He held this opinion for about fifteen years, until the picture was moved into a better light, and then it was suggested to him by Dr. Richter, who had carefully examined it, that it was not an original, but most probably a very good old copy of one by Sodoma, now lost. Of these drawings in pen and ink, one, he says, is at Weimar under the name of Leonardo. It is a kneeling figure of Leda bending to the left towards the crouching swan, while the twins, Castor and Pollux, lie beneath some rushes to her right.

In another at Chatsworth (also given to Leonardo) Leda’s head is upright, and the swan raising its neck towards her, while the two children have become four. In both of these the shading is done with curved lines across the figure with exceedingly little cross-hatching.

At Windsor there is another pen drawing of the full length figure (Grov. Gall. Pub. 50), and this is probably the study from which the picture was made. It is so[38] much like Raphael’s work that it is still generally considered as his. Morelli, however, has written: “Looking more closely at the drawing we cannot fail to recognise the spirit and the hand of Sodoma in the form of the feet, the full, fleshy knees, the almond-shaped eyes, and the arrangement of the hair, which is quite unlike Raphael, and the fine strokes of the pen.”[28]

There is also at Windsor a sheet of studies for the head, in four different positions, with elaborately coiled and braided hair. It passes for a Leonardo, but a red chalk drawing in the Ambrosiana, which gives the head and shoulders, is rightly ascribed to Sodoma.

Lomazzo, in his Trattato della Pittura, quoted Leonardo as having made a Leda with the swan, but we believe that no well-authenticated picture by Leonardo treating this subject is in existence, although there are several ascribed to him in Germany, and a large number of drawings in different parts of Europe. The subject may have been given by him as an academical study in the same way as the much repeated composition of the Virgin upon the knees of St. Anne.

A small “Madonna and Child” in the Turin Gallery is believed to belong to these years of Sodoma’s life. It has warm colouring, but is heavy and dark in the shadows. The Madonna holds the Infant Christ, who plays with a bird, and St. Joseph, a clear cut, clean-shaven face, peers over her left shoulder at the Child.

[39]

There is a replica of this in the Munich Gallery (No. 1073) which Morelli says is superior in freshness and spontaneity. We have not seen it, but can readily believe this observation, as the Turin Madonna has been heavily retouched.

SUCCESS AT SIENA

Milanesi believes that it was soon after his second Roman visit that Sodoma went first to stay at Piombino, a little seaport town at the extreme end of the promontory of Populonia. Its prince was one of the Appiano family, originally from Pisa, who had obtained possession of the land towards the close of the fourteenth century. He, too, was anxious not to be behindhand in the culture of the fine arts, and to his court had come years before, the great Leonardo. It may have been through Leonardo that Sodoma became known to him: he certainly spent many years under the roof of James V., though we are unable to trace any work which he may have done there. From Piombino he apparently went straight to Florence, to the yearly races, armed with an introduction from James of Piombino to the ruling Medici.

The letter, dated June 18th, 1515, recommends “JOAN ANTONIO DE’ AVERZÈ, his servant and bearer of the letter, who goes to Florence, to run his horses.”[29]

The Pope, Leo X., was also in Florence at this moment, on his way to Bologna to meet the French king, Francis I., and Sodoma speaks, in one of his letters to the Duke of Ferrara, as having been in his company. However, he received no commission from those in high[41] places, and seems to have been generally disappointed at his reception in Florence.

But to the little Olivetan monastery, outside the Porta San Frediano, had reached some record of his doings at the parent foundation near Siena, and the Abbot Brandolini set him to fresco the façade of the refectory. He left there the “Last Supper,” which was overlaid with whitewash almost directly after its execution, and only brought to light a few years ago. Fragments of it had been seen by M. Eugène Müntz more than twenty years ago, but the fresco had been neither entirely uncovered nor identified.

It must have originally consisted of thirteen figures. In those five which remain we find skilful drawing, and, despite the great masses of colour which the plaster has carried away, we can perceive that the painting was both deliberate and careful. Vasari’s blame, therefore, appears to be rather without explanation, “for,” he says, “these figures turned out so ill that he was made fun of for his fooleries by those who expected something better from him.”

The figure of Christ, though not as full of expression as Sodoma generally painted Him, is noble and dignified, Judas has more personal vigour, and here again is an instance of the artist concentrating his faculties upon the character which happened to interest him most at the moment, and treating with a certain superficiality others which should be of equal importance. Sodoma was vexed with the abbot of the monastery, annoyed generally at the reception which had been given him in Florence, and he was probably more in a mood to paint Judas than the lofty character of Christ. This is so[42] speaking a face that it is, without doubt, a portrait; the nose and lips are firmly modelled, the eye full of character. The hair is very characteristic, the close, crisp curls of the Lombard school, which Sodoma continued to paint up to the very end.

At Our Lord’s right hand, St. Peter, with upraised knife, propounds his astonishing question, “Lord, is it I?” St. John slumbers on the left shoulder of Christ, a young and placid face with the absence of expression common in sleep. Behind Judas an older apostle looks thoughtfully on.

In this undisputed work of Sodoma’s we may observe his particular care in the drawing and modelling of the hands and feet, in Judas’ foot, with the high lights on heel and muscle, and the strained tendons of the ankle. It is one of his least-known frescoes and deserves a higher reputation than has hitherto been accorded to it.

It was probably for quite other than an artistic reason that the abbot caused this fresco to be whitewashed. At the time of the races a scandal became attached to the name of the painter, and it was perhaps thought advisable to disown any connection with him and to quickly cover up his work. Bazzi had not been received as cordially as he had expected, and the Florentines may have treated him to some of these epithets of doubtful decency which even their literary men of high standing were not averse to showering upon one another. As it happened, his horse was the winner of the race, and when the boys who ran behind the trumpets proclaiming aloud the name of the proprietor of the victorious horse came to him to ask who he was, he replied by a coarse witticism meant to reflect upon the[43] Florentines, but which instead became a source of discredit to himself.

He was obviously free and easy in his manners, careless of appearances and presumably not more moral than most artists of his time, and that he had a love for dubious jests is proved by the inventory of his household goods which he drew up for the Siennese commission in 1531 and which Ugurgieri copied. Nevertheless, we believe, that Vasari, in relating this anecdote, and giving to it a scandalous significance, has done him grave injustice. This name came to be universally accepted, and he is even entered by it in the Archives of the town. He signed his own letters Sodona, and was finally so addressed by the Signoria.

The next few years saw the production of a great fresco at Siena in the cloister of San Francesco. This represented the “Judgment of Pilate” and the “Flagellation of Our Lord.” Under an open colonnade was to be found the Hebrew judicial court, Pilate surrounded by a number of angry Jews, and, a little to the side, the figure of the bound and buffeted Christ.

The whole painting suffered terribly from damp and exposure and even in Della Valle’s time the Christ was protected by glass. By degrees the remaining portion of the fresco peeled off, and then disappeared the portrait of Sodoma himself, painted, Vasari says, beardless and with long hair. In 1842 the figure of Christ was sawn away from the wall and taken to the public gallery, where it is now enclosed within a frame.

A highly-polished marble column breaks the circle of an arch, through which one sees a pale, watery sky and faintly indicated sea and shore. The figure is nude,[44] save for the mauve drapery about the loins, and to right and left are the fragments of two red arms, those of the tormenting soldiers. The head is singularly noble and dignified, and the torso modelled with the delicacy of sentiment which is so marked in his sketches in the Uffizi, the dead Christ on the knees of the Virgin, and the dead Christ in the sepia drawing of the Trinity. Rio, speaking of this fresco, says: “Pour le Christ il faut une profondeur de sentiment et une élévation de l’âme dont le superficial Bazzi ne fut jamais capable.” This is an opinion which we cannot endorse, for if there was a subject which Bazzi treated with reverence and profundity it was that of the adult Christ.

The man himself was full of turbulent passion, full of artistic waywardness, unbalanced often in his value and estimate of life; but that he was altogether superficial and without reverence no one can believe who has studied his work with an unprejudiced mind.

The representation of physical suffering borne with calm was a constantly recurring subject among the later Greeks; the early Christian conception of the Crucifixion and Martyrdoms is but too familiar in the catacomb frescoes and the contorted forms of Neri da Bicci or Margaritone. In the one we have a stoical indifference to pain, in the other an agonizing susceptibility to the physical side of it.

Sodoma’s great fresco touches neither extreme. It has all the godlike dignity of a Greek hero, all the human pathos of a mediæval martyr. It is, perhaps, most akin in art to those Græco-Roman statues, the Dying Gladiator and the Laocoon, works which fused the dual elements of two contrasting art-ideals.[45] The Laocoon and the Gladiator came into the world at a culminating point, when the perfect technique of pagan art was being leavened by a new sense of spiritual intensity. The work of Sodoma and some of his contemporaries marks also a central transitional point in the refluent movement, retaining the sentiment of mediæval devotion with the added quality of accurate and beautiful form. Sodoma’s Christ is silent, the lips are parted in the intensity of pain, the flesh upon the arm is livid where the tense ropes bind it to the column, and where the thorny crown has pressed into the brow great drops of blood still ooze. Yet it is the intellectual suffering of the figure which strikes and holds one’s attention. Far greater than the personal insult, overpowering all sense of momentary pain, there is present a touch of the universal sorrow, of the Weltschmerz which the prophet must feel. In this work the painter touched his most ideal creation.

To the same period, 1517-18, should belong one or more oil paintings of “Lucretia.” Vasari mentions a nude “Lucretia stabbing herself,” which he did for Pope Leo X., and for which, in return, he was made Cavalliere di Cristo. In a letter to the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, dated 1518, Sodoma refers to a “Lucretia” which he had painted for him, but which, being seen by Giuliano de’ Medici, was promptly bought by that Prince, and it is most likely that this was the picture of which Vasari spoke, and which so pleased the Pontiff that he created the artist a knight. Dr. Richter considers this painting as lost. Signor Milanesi, editing Vasari’s life, declares, however, that this is the identical “Lucretia” which was taken to Hanover by Herr[46] von Kestner, who had been ambassador to Rome, and which has now been presented with the rest of his collection to the town of Hanover. But Dr. Frizzoni, who saw it in 1869, criticising it by the newer method, and taking into consideration its clear shadows and rather marked outlines, as well as a considerable difference in the composition, believes it to be the work of an earlier period, thus agreeing with Richter as to the total disappearance of the Papal “Lucretia.”

Vasari also mentions another picture of the same subject done by Sodoma for Assuero Rettori da San Martino, and which may not improbably be the one which now hangs in the Turin Gallery. It is very much restored, and was generally considered as a Gianpietrino until Morelli assigned it to Sodoma; and I find Frizzoni mentioning yet another “Lucretia” attributed to Sodoma, a panel, much blackened, which now belongs to Herr Weber of Hamburg. That he should produce three or four slightly varying copies of the same figure need not surprise us, seeing that the original not only greatly pleased the Pope, but was even praised by his enemy Vasari. Also, classical and mythological pictures were more largely bought just then by private individuals than religious ones.

The “Charity” at Berlin most probably belongs to this date. It is an oblong picture, consisting of a single female figure, clothed in a heavy drapery, with downcast eyes and crisply curled hair. She holds one infant in her arms, and two plump children cling about her knees; the landscape is singularly transparent and very like that of the St. George at Richmond. It was formerly attributed to Baldassare Peruzzi, and to[47] Morelli we owe its enumeration among the works of Sodoma.

In 1515, before coming down to Florence for the races, the committee directing the works of the Siennese cathedral commissioned him to cast in bronze two figures of Apostles for the high altar, and also to give free lessons in drawing, to four young men attached to the works.[30] We do not find that these bronzes were ever cast; however, he must have had some skill in modelling, for his studio was said to be full of models in plaster and clay.

On the 11th of January 1515, Matteo di Giuliano di Lorenzo Balducci apprenticed himself for six years to our painter, agreeing for four years to pay him annually at the August festival of St. Mary the sum of twenty ducats, and for the remaining two years to work with and under his master. In return Sodoma was to teach him, to pay his expenses, clothe and shoe him suitably.[31] Of this Balducci we know little, and his few works have not the mark of genius. The master had other pupils working directly under him, Girolamo Magagni, called Giomo del Sodoma, Lorenzo Brazzi, called Rustico, and Bartolommeo Neroni, nicknamed Riccio, who not only married the painter’s daughter, Faustina, but was associated with him in several works. Riccio was the author of one of the Monte Oliveto frescoes, and of a delightful little Pietà in fresco on the walls of the collegiate church of Asciano.

Besides these, there were one or two men of individual[48] talent, who, though they may not have formally placed themselves under Sodoma’s tuition, were glad to learn from him, and, either voluntarily or insensibly, adopted much of his manner and formed their style upon his. Of these were Pacchia and Beccafumi, who in 1518 found themselves associated with him in the decoration of the little oratory near San Francesco, dedicated to San Bernardino. Sodoma, naturally, was chosen as the director of these works, and of Beccafumi, who had known him in Rome, Vasari relates that “having heard Giovanni Antonio of Vercelli praised as a capable man, he came to Siena, and seeing that he had a good foundation in drawing, in which he knew the strength of workers in art to lie, he set himself with much study to follow him, that which he had already done in Rome not being enough.”[32]

The earliest of the series was the “Birth of the Virgin,” by Pacchia, then came Sodoma’s “Presentation in the Temple.” A crowd of men and women are gathered under an open colonnade with classical columns. In the background the little Virgin is ascending the steps towards the high priest, but the Child has turned back towards St. Anne, and the priest is bending forward and has seized her by the shoulders. A group of women in the left foreground is headed by a graceful figure in blue and white, while to the left a tall and stalwart youth introduces a mass of brilliant colour with his deep orange draperies. A fountain occupies the centre of the court, and the whole is framed by pilasters enriched with graceful Renaissance ornament.

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In the second of Sodoma’s frescoes, “The Salutation,” St. Elizabeth and the Virgin meet within an alcove. The Virgin is bending forward, and, were the figure upright, would be considerably taller than all the others. She has heavy draperies of blue, faded to white where the light strikes. Her face is very tenderly modelled, with a good deal of hatching in the shadows. St. Elizabeth, kneeling, has gorgeous robes of green and yellow, Joachim, behind her, wears a white head-dress, and a woman to the left fills up the need for more distributed colour by a brick-red dress. This same woman leads a charmingly drawn and carefully painted child, nude, save for a transparent muslin shirt. The child is, perhaps, the most concentrated piece of painting in the picture, and is a charming example of Sodoma’s treatment of putti.

In the “Assumption of the Madonna,” the third fresco, he has adopted the conventional composition usually employed. An open sarcophagus in the exact centre, the lines of its perspective running parallel with the eye, and six disciples on either hand, in graduated heights. Above them, the Madonna rises in her white robes surrounded by a semicircle of flying angels. In this broad sweep of two semicircular lines across the composition we are inevitably reminded of Raphael.

The last fresco, which stands between the windows, was finished in 1532, after Sodoma had been away from Siena for several years. The figures in it are more than life-size and are densely packed together. The white-robed Madonna kneels in the centre, while Christ, in red and blue, places the crown upon her head. Around them are grouped, Noah, Adam and[50] Eve, St. John Baptist, and others, and, in a glory above, hovers the Holy Spirit. In none of these compositions is Sodoma quite at his best, probably because this more ambitious kind of work was not what he excelled in. The presence of so many figures evidently confused him, and in their grouping there is generally a sense of compression, or else a straggling line which is eminently undecorative. And in all of them he has singled out special figures for his particular care, the Madonna and the Child in the “Salutation,” or the three awe-stricken apostles to the left in the “Assumption,” unfortunately beginning to peel. The whole colouring of these frescoes is, however, warm, and the modelling large. The flesh is broadly washed on, with the shadows boldly hatched, and the dark outline, noticeable in his earlier frescoes, is far less frequent. There is, however, much carelessness in the drawing, and we can hardly endorse Vasari’s praise of the three single figures which fill up the smaller spaces between doors and windows, St. Francis, St. Anthony of Padua, and St. Louis of Toulouse. The San Bernardino in the opposite corner, is now admitted to be not by him, but by Pacchia, as proved by documentary evidence.

The “Adoration of the Magi,” which hangs in the Piccolomini Chapel in the church of St. Agostino, is believed to have been done about this time. It is a very large panel, painted in Sodoma’s most brilliant manner, and especially recommends itself to the consideration of students in that it exemplifies so very aptly all the leading characteristics of our painter enumerated by Morelli in connection with the Städel portrait at Frankfort.

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We have the rocky landscape in transparent blue tints, the knight on horseback, and the tufty, dark-leaved trees. We have the tapering fingers and the almond eyes, the lips so undefinable at the corners, and we have the round “eye” to his draperies, as well as the crisp, almost wiry hair.

This panel was the occasion of a lawsuit which Sodoma lost in 1536; but it was not therefore necessarily painted in that year, although the commentators of Vasari so believe. Its whole technique points to an earlier period, and Frizzoni, judging it by its colouring, its accurate compact drawing, and the amount of light and atmosphere, puts it back as early as 1518.

If the head of the shepherd, wedged in between the two tree trunks, be really Sodoma’s portrait, as tradition asserts, it must certainly belong to this earlier period when the painter was about forty or forty-one years of age. The picture has a further historical interest in the fact that several of the heads are portraits of leading members of the Piccolomini family,[33] into whose possession the picture passed early in the sixteenth century.

Sir Francis Cook has, in his gallery at Richmond, a panel which is perhaps the most delightful example of Sodoma’s art which we have in this country.

This subject is legendary—St. George, the knight of Cappadocia, in his contest with the Lycian dragon. It has the same deep, rich tone as the “Adoration,” a transparent bluish background, a broad river winding between two hills, with a walled and battlemented town upon its banks.

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In the foreground the princess, in her crimson and yellow robe, and St. George, upon his charger, bent forward in the strenuous pose of eager and concentrated movement, with red doublet flying in the wind, head lowered, and lance pointed ready for the charge. The horse too, apparently shares his master’s excitement, in straining eyes, dilated nostrils, and open mouth. The foreground is very dark, too dark almost to be clearly visible at a first glance, but after a while one discerns the broken tree-stumps, the wet stones and flowing stream, and fresh green water-weeds, and, lying about on the land, the bones of the dragon’s former victims.

The whole picture is one glowing bit of colour, not the broad lights and luminous shadows, such as the Venetians understood by colour, but a quiet, gemlike glow of subdued warmth. It was painted between 1515 and 1518 for Alfonzo, Duke of Ferrara, just before the artist left Siena on that untraceable journey of his.

UNKNOWN PERIOD, AND RETURN TO SIENA

After the commencement of the San Bernardino frescoes Sodoma disappeared from Tuscany, and an amount of uncertainty has gathered round his doings during the next seven years. There are no more documents concerning him to be found at Siena till 1525, and the political condition of the city was just then very unfavourable to artistic work.

Pandolfo Petrucci, the some-time governor, had died in 1512, and been interred with princely pomp and honour; but although under his rule Siena had enjoyed much prosperity and a certain amount of unity between the rival factions, both Pandolfo and his successor lacked the personal qualities that might have founded a dynasty. His son, Borghese, seceded after three years, and the ambitious cardinal-cousin, Raffaello, seized the reins of government. It was during his ascendancy that Sodoma vanished from Siena.

It is probable that he went straight to Mantua, for a letter addressed to the Marchese Francesco Gonzaga in May 1518, speaks of the painter’s intention to shortly visit him. This letter was found not long ago among the Mantuan Archives, by Signor Guiseppe Campori, and if Sodoma carried out the intention which he expressed therein, he probably spent the summer in the Ducal House of the Gonzaga. On the same[54] day (May 3rd) he wrote another letter to Alfonzo d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, suggesting that he should visit him at Ferrara, bringing with him a certain panel which he had been commissioned to paint by the duke’s ambassador—the “St. George and the Dragon,” now belonging to Sir Francis Cook. This letter was found at Modena among the Este Archives, by Cav. Adolfo Venturi, and there is no reason to doubt that the visit was paid. There is also an entry among the documents at Reggio d’Emilia, which mentions one Giovanni Antonio de’ Bazzi of Parma, a painter, and for the moment citizen of Reggio,[34] who acted as witness to two deeds drawn up in the November of that year. It is certainly true that the name of Bazzi was a not uncommon one in Parma, and we are at a loss to understand why Sodoma should describe himself as a Parmesan when he had for so long enjoyed the civic rights and privileges of Siena.

He may have stayed a little time in Parma before proceeding to Reggio, thus giving rise to a misapprehension, or he may deliberately, for prudential reasons, have wished to conceal his identity.

Both Herr Jansen and Milanesi believe that the artist here referred to was our Siennese; but Frizzoni is of opinion that there may have been another less known and inferior painter of the some name.

Morelli believes that Sodoma now passed into Lombardy, and there renewed his connection with the school of Leonardo, perfecting himself in the[55] manner towards which he had always shown so strong a predilection. But we are wanting in documents to prove his actual presence in Milan, and the works which have been attributed to him within late years are not so well-authenticated as to be clear proofs of his presence there.

One of these works which bears a strong resemblance to his style, is a fresco on the wall of one of the rooms of the Villa Melzi at Vaprio, about which the opinion of critics is still largely divided. This is a gigantic group, more than life-size, and terribly out of proportion. The Virgin is only portrayed down to the waist, the face is oval, with the long nose, thin, half-smiling lips, and almond eyes of the school, the hair waved crisply over brow and neck. The head is turned to the right, and the eyes downcast. The Infant Christ is apparently seated on the Virgin’s left arm, the little face is curiously exaggerated, almost a caricature, with features puffed and grotesque, and the Virgin’s right hand is over-large and shapeless.

To which of the Lombard masters this should be assigned is a matter difficult to decide. Rio[35] and Mündler, as well as Amoretti, thought it a genuine Leonardo, done in return for Melzi’s hospitality, but this is obviously impossible, for Leonardo is never known to have worked in “buon fresco.” Milanesi believed it to be more probably by Francesco Melzi himself, the friend and pupil of Leonardo, and in this opinion he is followed by some recent German critics.[56] Morelli, however, attributed it unhesitatingly to Sodoma, “executed probably between 1518 and 1521, during his stay in Lombardy.” (The Borghese and Doria Pamphili Galleries, p. 157.)

To this unknown period are assigned a number of small panels and canvases which are scattered about over North Italy in private collections. These severally bear a marked affinity to the Lombard school, but in the round freedom of their drawing and a certain largeness, almost carelessness of design, they all differ from the work attributed to the other Milanese masters. They are evidently the production of a man trained in the Lombard School, but who had been subjected to southern influences, and was haunted by a memory of the Tuscan manner.

Signor Frizzoni has a penitent Magdalen, in neutral tints, with slightly parted lips and flowing hair. A white chemise and a white vase of ointment in her hand form the only contrast to the flesh-tints. This little picture is very interesting, for it may be regarded either as an experiment on Sodoma’s part in the fuller treatment of light and shade, or else as being indicative of his habitual manner of painting easel pictures. If the latter, it would show him to be completely Leonardo’s pupil, whose large “Adoration of the Magi” which hangs in the Uffizi is most probably a prepared ground, a study in values which was to have been painted over in oil.

Most of the panels of the Lombard school have a certain brilliancy in the light flesh-tints and an almost exaggerated modelling, which might lead to the supposition that they were underpainted, and Sodoma’s[57] own panels have this luminosity in their shadows to a marked degree.

Another monochrome is in the possession of the heirs of the late Signor Ginoulhiac of Milan. In this the Virgin has delicately drawn features, the eyes rather longer and narrower and the eyelids less deep than is usual with him, Sodoma generally giving a pronounced fulness of eyeball to his youthful figures. Her light muslin sleeves gathered at the wrist, and the dark drapery over head and shoulders fastened by a modern brooch suggest the idea that it may have been painted as a portrait and the halo which converted it into a Madonna added afterwards. The Child’s deep-set eyes and low cranium also look as if it had been a study from life.

In 1525 Sodoma was back again in Siena, painting for the city guilds, which continued to give him work in spite of the condition of grave political disturbance.

Cardinal Raffaello Petrucci died in 1522; he was succeeded by Francesco, who soon gave place to Fabio, the youngest of Pandolfo’s sons. Fabio was driven out by the populace; and, in 1525, the city, torn by rival factions, not strong enough to govern herself, nor willing, after the Petrucci tyranny, to elect one man as her leader, placed herself under the protection of the new Emperor Charles V. She created, for the management of local affairs, a magistracy of “ten guardians of the liberty of the State,” uniting the different Monti, or guilds under one, which consisted of that of the reigning nobles. The city, now freed from the irksome rule, which nevertheless had maintained order and kept the smaller factions from fighting, now gave[58] herself over to a renewal of ancient rivalries, not even quelled when the Emperor came in person ten years later.

Notwithstanding, or perhaps in consequence of this political unrest, the Siennese experienced a revival of religious fervour, and, keen in their old belief that the town was under the special protection of the Virgin, began to adorn the city gates and the walls of public buildings with her image. To these years belong some of Sodoma’s finest works, the chapel of St. Catherine in San Domenico, the colossal figures of St. Ansano and St. Victor in the Palazzo Pubblico, and the beautiful St. Sebastian of the Florence Gallery.

It was in 1525, when once more back in Siena, that Sodoma painted the second of his masterpieces, the “Standard with the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.” It was done for a confraternity—that of St. Sebastian in Camollia—during the priorate of Matteo Fraschini, and was carried through the city at the head of a procession during times of pestilence. The contract was completed on the 3rd May 1525, and he was to receive twenty ducats for it, but the painter was apparently not satisfied with this agreement, and the matter was submitted to a certain barber, Antonio di Pasquino, who was evidently regarded as a keen judge of the fine arts, for he accounted the finished work to be worth more than the twenty ducats stated in the contract. The Signoria, therefore, quite willing to abide by the barber’s decision, paid him another six, and the Chapter, deliberating on the work, which they deemed carefully and diligently done, determined to give him yet another four ducats.

To this Sodoma subscribed: “Io mise Giovane[59] Antonio sopradeto so ’contento a quanto di sopra si contiene, e per fede ò scritto de mano propria.”[36] (“I, the above-named Giovanni Antonio, am content with what is contained above, and in testimony have written with my own hand.”)

The subject was one with which he was in entire sympathy, and he gave time and enthusiasm to the drawing of the noble figure, with its severe, classical lines, and its uplifted, spiritual face.

Edward Schurè wrote of it: “Le beau corps de l’adolescent, lié contre un arbre est percé de flêches, couvert de gouttes de sang et tout frémissant de douleur. Mais sur son visage et dans son regard tourné vers le ciel, se joue, à travers la souffrance, un ravissement céleste. L’état d’âme qui se reflête sur ce visage est semblable à celui qui produisent les chœurs de Palestrina.”[37] (“The beautiful form of the young man, bound to a tree, is pierced with arrows, covered with drops of blood, and quivering with pain. But on his face and in his upturned glance there plays, through all the suffering, a heavenly rapture. The state of mind reflected on his face is akin to that produced by the choruses of Palestrina.”)

J. A. Symonds’ appreciation is more profound. “Sodoma’s ‘St. Sebastian,’” he wrote, in his “Renaissance in Italy,” vol. iii., “notwithstanding its wan and faded colouring, is still the very best that has been painted. Suffering, refined and spiritual, without a contortion or a spasm, could not be presented in a form of[60] more surpassing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture in the fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the mind. Part of its remarkable charm may be due to the bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian sentiment of martyrdom. Only the Renaissance could have produced a hybrid so successful, because so deeply felt.” The “St. Sebastian” portion is in low tones, a cold landscape almost in monochrome, the one warm element being the brown shadows in the tree trunk. The angel has an indigo robe, and brings with him a haze of lemon-yellow light as he descends from heaven with the martyr’s crown. The flesh-tints of the saint himself are also cold, the whole picture owes very little of its effect to colour, and its beauty lies in the sculpturesque treatment of form, and the immense feeling of atmosphere.

On the back of this picture is painted another—the Madonna seated upon a cloud, while below her are St. Roch, St. Sigismund of Hungary, and six white-robed brothers of the Order, all kneeling with uplifted eyes. The greater beauty and fame of the “St. Sebastian,” and the fact that the picture has to be turned round in order to see this Madonna, has prevented it receiving the attention it deserves, being, as it is, one of the most excellent examples of Sodoma’s special technique. That it lacks the deeper feeling which many of his other pictures possess does not lessen its value as a particularly characteristic specimen of his brush-work.

It is not easy to understand how this gonfalone or banner could possibly be the immediate successor[61] of the Vaprio Madonna. Vasari says that certain merchants of Lucca offered three hundred golden scudi for it, but the confraternity could not bear the thought of so beautiful a painting leaving the city, and refused the offer.

In 1525 Sodoma was employed by the company of Santa Croce to paint three scenes from the Passion in fresco.

Of these three frescoes, the “Calvary,” “Gethsemane,” and “Hades,” the two latter were, in 1841, sawn away from the walls and transported to the Siena gallery, and the “Christ bearing the Cross on the way to Calvary” conveyed to the little chapel of the monastery of Sant’ Eugenio, about three miles outside Porta San Marco, now Villa Griccioli. It has been terribly restored, especially the faces of Christ and St. Veronica. The figure is clothed in red and crowned with thorns. Simon, bearing the base of the Cross looks mournfully backward. On the right, kneels St. Veronica, lifting her handkerchief towards the Saviour, and behind her is a female figure in purple, with clasped hands, probably the Madonna. A crowd of soldiers, on foot and horse, fills up the background. Of the two frescoes now lodged in the gallery at Siena, one represents the Garden of Gethsemane with Our Lord kneeling alone upon a high mound, clad in a spreading mauve drapery, while below Him are huddled together the sleeping forms of the three disciples.

In far better preservation, and of far more original worth, is the companion fresco, giving Our Lord’s descent into Hades. The semi-nude figure of Eve has all his usual grace and carefulness, and is a[62] characteristic example of his modelling of legs and feet. The fleshy knee, with its high lights and rather thick muscles around the ankle, are to found again in the Berlin “Charity,” and in the various drawings for the Borghese “Leda.” Eve’s face has a wistfulness which is very tender and human as she watches the triumphant Victor over death and corruption lift up to life her young son Abel.

That Sodoma was not above lending his pencil to art of a purely decorative nature is proved by the existence of sundry little panels which formed the head and tail-pieces of the open biers in which the Siennese are still wont to carry their dead. These are generally oval at the top, the shape of a tombstone, and are painted in oils back and front with figures of the Madonna and of the dead Christ. There are several series of these panels in the various churches of Siena, which are attributed to Sodoma, and belong, we believe, to this middle period of his residence there.

One of them, begun in 1525, was painted for the company of the Trinita, and now hangs in the little church of San Donato, sawn into four panels. It is attributed by different critics to Beccafumi and to Marco da Siena, and even if it be by Sodoma, as some maintain, is not one of his best.

A really beautiful set, however, was completed in the following year for the company of San Giovanni della Morte, a branch of the brothers of the Misericordia. On the 27th of May 1527, Sodoma was paid ninety-eight lire for this bier, and Vasari gives it his unqualified praise in the words, “I think this is the most beautiful (bier), that one could possibly find.” The four panels[63] are to be found in the church of San Giovanni della Morte. Another set are on the walls of the Siena Gallery, the two most successful of these are the Virgin and Child holding a bird in its hand, with two figures in the background crowned with vine and shamrock, and that of the half-length form of the Dead Christ supported by female figures. The third represents another Virgin and Child with angels, and the fourth has two green-robed brothers of the Misericordia kneeling in adoration before the jewelled Cross.

Dr. Richter has in his possession a small panel of this size and form, representing a dead Christ supported by angels which most probably also formed part of burial fittings. Dr. Richter dates it about 1530, and the dark shadows and rather heavy modelling of the angels are quite compatible with this late date. The Christ is not one of the artist’s happiest conceptions; he apparently reserved his full attention for larger and more important works.

Very like it in treatment especially, is the face of Our Lord in the Pietà in the Borghese Gallery, which has many of the mannerisms of the later Lombard school. It was formerly roughly attributed to the school of Leonardo, but Frizzoni was the first to recognize in it the forms of face, draperies, and landscape peculiar to Sodoma. Morelli agreed with him in this opinion, and the picture is now catalogued as Sodoma’s.

Yet that he could, when he chose, portray with dignity and feeling the helplessness of death is proved by two exquisite drawings in the Uffizi. The smaller and more beautiful of these is a sketch, in silver point, of the Christ dead in His Mother’s arms. It is evidently a study for[64] the Pietà which he painted on the walls of the Casa Bambagini, Siena. The fresco itself, is not in a good state of preservation, high up, and covered with glass. The lower portion has peeled very considerably, and the four or five heads of angels and saints just discernible, around the Virgin are almost defaced. The Virgin herself has a mantle of very faded blue and an expression of intense sadness, the face of Our Lord is singularly majestic and dignified, but perhaps there is more sentiment in the little sketch which we reproduce.

The other drawing is evidently a study for the picture of the Trinity which he painted for the Rosary Chapel of San Domenico, a pencil-drawing washed with sepia and Chinese white. In it the Eternal Father bears the dead Christ upon His knee, the Dove hovers above them, and St. Catherine of Siena and several other saints are grouped around.

Siena is rich in local saints of the type dear to the Tuscan populace—the man or woman of humble, holy life, sprung from their midst and related to the citizens, and in whom the miraculous element is subordinate to the human qualities of piety and charitable work. It was the Beato Bernardo Tolomei, the rich young noble who forsook his fast companions and founded the parent monastery of the Olivetan order; or San Bernardino, the Franciscan preacher, awakening a religious revival through Tuscany, and Umbria; or it was Catherine Benincasa, the tanner’s daughter, who laboured among the poor and plague-stricken of her quarter, and by her writing and exhortation was indirectly instrumental in bringing back the Papal Court from Avignon to Rome. This character was still a familiar[65] memory to the people of Siena when Sodoma lived and painted, and far more real and dear to them than the almost mythical saints Ansano and Victor of the early centuries. The church of San Domenico had consecrated more than one chapel to her memory. The first contained a contemporary portrait of the saint by her friend and protégé, Andrea Vanni; the second was now destined to be decorated with scenes from her life by the hand of Sodoma.

He received the commission in 1526, and the earliest and by far the best work which he did there is the fresco of “The Vision of St. Catherine,” a painting of such tender sentiment and delicate quality, as to enjoy a European fame. St. Catherine, perceiving the figure of the Saviour in the air, and receiving at the same time the marks of the stigmata in her own person, falls back fainting into the arms of two of her nuns. The three figures are wholly in white, the cloth tunic and scapulary of their order, a soft and mellowed white, deepening to bluish grey in the shadows, and thrown into relief by the dull browns and yellows of the landscape background. The figure of Christ, supported by boy-cherubs, which hovers above, was perhaps necessary to balance the composition, but it is by far the least attractive portion of the picture; the interest centres wholly in the human group, the tender faces of the women, the grace of flowing robes and deftly modelled arms.

Baldassare Peruzzi, Sodoma’s friend and associate, perhaps expressed the spirit of his contemporaries in his praise of this lovely fresco, and he has laid stress upon the accurate rendering of the physical signs of a psychological state, a point to which an eminent[66] physiologist of our own day, Prof. Angelo Mosso of Turin, has often called attention.[38] Vasari possessed for many years a little pen and ink drawing of this fresco, bearing a cartellino, high on the gilded column, with the date 1526. This drawing, now in the Uffizi collection, is too complete and faithful a copy of the fresco to be a study, and must have been done by Sodoma or one of his pupils after its completion.

The companion scene, on the right side of the altar, which portrays St. Catherine receiving the communion from the hands of an angel, has all Sodoma’s unrest of composition without his deeper sentiment. Both the figures of the three kneeling nuns and the Madonna and attendant angels which, with the Eternal Father, fill the upper part of the picture, are in Sodoma’s commonplace manner, graceful, it is true, but not sufficiently individual to merit the attention given to the other. Siena contains much of his work of this quality, work that is essentially and pre-eminently decorative, and perhaps does not aim at the reproduction of strong individual sentiment.

The left wall is covered with a scene from St. Catherine’s missionary work—the decapitation of the penitent thief, converted by the prayer of the saint while on his way to execution. The figure of the Captain of the Guard, dressed like a Roman centurion, has great vigour in the drawing, and among the crowd of women and soldiers are several heads of power and interest, but the composition as a whole is too crowded and densely packed, and has Sodoma’s usual defect of confusion and lack of symmetry.

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Vasari says that he made no studies for this particular fresco, but painted it straight away, without previous preparation, on to the damp plaster. This may account very greatly for its unsuccessful grouping and general sense of oppressiveness.

Over one of the doors in the sacristy is a large framed banner, bearing the Madonna in pale blue robes, surrounded by a group of little flying angels who scatter roses into her open tomb. The background is greenish with a distant view of Siena, a yellow glory envelops the angel children, several of whom are beautifully drawn and modelled. The Virgin’s face, however, has suffered from damp.

In the chapel of the Rosary, next to the High Altar, is a much blackened altar-piece, the study for which we have already mentioned, as being among the drawings in the Uffizi. The dead Christ lies on the knees of the Father, who holds a globe in His left hand. On either side stand two saints, SS. Dominic and Sigismund to the left, St. Catherine of Siena and a fine nude figure of St. Sebastian to the right. The town of San Gemignano is faintly visible below. In 1527 Sodoma was chosen to design the cartoons for a portion of the pavement of the cathedral,[39] but it is uncertain whether these designs were ever executed.

One of the next documents concerning him is an action which he brought against his scholar, Magagni, called Giomo del Sodoma, for a theft of the most flagrant and vulgar kind. The master was at Florence, whether on business or pleasure we do not know, and, falling ill, was nursed at the hospital of Sta.[68] Maria Nuova. That the popular painter, a welcome guest at many palaces, and known to most of the monastic communities, should be so entirely without friends in the city of the Medici as to be sent to a public ward of the great hospital is a matter of some surprise. But we have abundant evidence that Sodoma was not liked in Florence, and this may largely account for Vasari’s biassed prejudice. While thus ill, and probably not expected to recover, his enterprising pupil became possessed of the master’s keys, and, entering his studio, carried away a number of bronzes and fragments of marble, partly to Giomo’s own house, partly to that of Niccolò, his brother-in-law, a sword-maker.

The theft consisted also of boxes of silver coins, medals, portions of statues, marble feet, heads more or less imperfect, a bronze horse, a bronze statuette of Apollo, several terra-cottas and a number of artist’s utensils stored in a hen-house.

Besides these, there was a box containing a printed book, a manuscript book on necromancy (the eccentric painter perhaps dabbled a little also in the occult arts) and also uno libro scripto a mano che tracta di pictura.

Whether this were a copy of Leonardo’s famous treatise or an independent essay of Sodoma’s own we cannot tell. There was likewise a picture, “less than a yard high, with a Madonna and Child in act of espousing St. Catherine.” (Unfinished, and not to be traced.)

Needless to say that Sodoma won his case and Magagni was forced to bring back his stolen goods.[69] Milanesi believes him to have been ill at Florence in 1527, but Frizzoni observes that the action was only instituted in July 1529 and speaks of the theft as having taken place during the “present month” while Sodoma was ill.

LATER YEARS

Sodoma had worked hitherto for private patrons, or at best for ecclesiastical communities. Of municipal commissions he had received none as yet, and it was only in 1529 that the city gave him his first large public order in the painting of the walls of their council chambers.

The great Gothic Palazzo della Signoria which rises at the lower end of the sloping square had already lent its walls to decoration by older and stiffer hands. The pre-Raphaelites of Siena, Lippo Memmi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and others, had left there certain symbolical frescoes of quaint, grave beauty, rich in phantasy and sentiment, if meagre in line.

Sodoma was the first of the moderns called to work there.

Whether the Board of Guardians directing the scheme intended to cover the entire walls of the Sala del Mappamondo with decorative frescoes has not been ascertained. At any rate, Sodoma was instructed to paint two huge figures, standing within ornamental niches, which should form pendants to one another, and a third, treated in a similar manner, on the wall at right angles to them. The commission was given him in 1529, and during the same year he completed the two first, the colossal St. Victor over the door which leads[71] to the Sala della Pace, and the St. Ansano baptising neophytes in the niche near the window.

In September, when these were completed, two fellow-painters were called in to estimate their value—Domenico Beccafumi, who had been Sodoma’s companion in the work at San Bernardino, and a certain Bartolommeo di David, of whom all that we know, is that a few years later he was associated with Riccio in the painting of a chapel in the Collegiata d’ Asciano. These men appraised the works as meriting twenty-seven scudi of good gold,[40] with which sum Sodoma expressed himself perfectly satisfied.

He had taken pains over the work. In these two Saints it was principally youthful strength and grace which he was required to represent; the moral and physical force of the Roman soldier, the sweetness of the young martyred missionary.

He certainly portrayed strength in the commanding figure of St. Victor, majestically grand in his brilliant toga of red, with blue cloak, and cuirass of green and gold, but it is the strength of young, vigorous manhood in repose. The power of movement is suggested under the heavy armour, but there is no attempt at representing action, and for this very reason Sodoma attained a greater success than if he had aimed at dramatic display.

A pencil sketch in the Uffizi (No. 1939) reproduces this figure in detail. It is not, however, recognised by Morelli, and bears every probability of being a copy by a pupil. In the accompanying fresco of St. Ansano baptising neophytes, with its wistful, feminine type[72] of beauty, he has found the exact antithesis of St. Victor. It is open to discussion whether these two groups do not, in their composition, outstep the limits of purely decorative art. The kneeling Christian, whose foot lies over the edge of the painted parapet, and the seated putto who bears St. Victor’s helmet, are as far removed from the reserve and restriction of the quattro-cento as Correggio’s foreshortened flights of angels. The introduction of absolute realism and the attempt to produce the illusion of tactile values was now growing common, even in mural decoration, where a finer sense of boundaries and a flatter treatment of form would have led undoubtedly to more artistic results. Raphael, whom we may perhaps consider as the greatest of decorative painters, was, in his earlier work, guided by a far more refined and truthful perception of the exigencies and “unities” of this form of art than in his latest period, when the sculpturesque manner of regarding painting had become common. For this reason the “School of Athens,” and still more so the “Disputa,” fulfil their decorative purpose more fully than the “Parnassus,” in spite of its individual forms of beauty. Sodoma, in his work of this period, could not escape the influence of the time, and we find him repeating the same defect in his San Bernardo Tolomei on the right hand wall, and in the Spanish chapel of San Spirito, which he was next employed to fresco.

The town was now under the protection of Charles V. and occupied by a French and Spanish garrison. The latter was sufficiently numerous to own the little chapel referred to, and its decoration by Sodoma was brought about in the following manner. Armenini relates the[73] quaint story in the first book of his Veri precetti della pittura (chap. i.): The Cavalier Sodoma, he informs us, being one day rudely accosted by a soldier of the guard, was unable to obtain from him the apology which he demanded, or to discover the offender’s name from his companions. Sodoma was determined to obtain redress, and, after gazing fixedly at the man for some moments, he turned on his heel, went home, and there carefully drew a sketch of his features. The following day he presented himself before the Spanish governor, told his tale and demanded the satisfaction that his dignity required. The governor was quite willing to punish the insolent soldier, but wished to know how to identify him. Sodoma then drew the portrait from under his cloak, and exposing it to the view of all present, exclaimed: “Sire, this is his face. I cannot describe him to you otherwise.”

The man was instantly recognised, and received his merited punishment, and the painter, brought thus before the notice of the officers, not only became exceedingly popular among the Spanish colony, but very shortly after was commissioned to decorate their chapel.

There is in the Uffizi a first sketch in red chalk for this fresco. Frizzoni mentions it as Sodoma’s, but Morelli does not include it in his list of the artist’s drawings. In the sketch St. James is on foot, a wand or staff in his hands, while, in the fresco, he rides furiously on horseback, lashing with his sword at the recumbent figures of four Turks, who, seen from below, are considerably foreshortened and again lap over the parapet which forms the boundary line of this fresco.[74] This large semicircular fresco is the upper portion or lunette of the chapel. The smaller lunette immediately under it forms part and parcel of the altar, and represents the Madonna investing St. Idelfonzo with the white chasuble of heavenly tissue with which she awarded his zeal in writing a treatise upon her perpetual virginity. St. Lucy, in a robe of greenish blue falling into short clinging folds, is perhaps the most graceful figure of the group. St. Rosalie, crowned with flowers, kneels behind St. Idelfonzo, and two adoring angels fill up the spaces behind the Madonna’s head.

The minor saints which flank the altar-piece (not by Sodoma) have gone, unfortunately, black, from the smoke of the candles which an unappreciative clergy permits to flare before them. Nearest the altar are St. Niccolò Tolentino and the Archangel Michael in the act of chaining the fiend. Outside the arch which confines the frescoes, properly belonging to the altar, are two saints, Sebastian and Anthony, and in the species of spandrel formed by the space between it and the walls of the chapel, two pairs of angels bear, amid floating ribbons, the arms of Spain, and St. James of Compostella.

On the 20th of January 1530,[41] Sodoma had finished the two figures of St. Sebastian and St. Anthony of Padua, and was paid four florins for the former and six for the latter painting, and by the 16th of April he had also completed the lower lunette with its kneeling groups of figures.

The Spaniards were distinctly pleased with their[75] chapel, and the Emperor, Charles V., coming to Siena, and seeing this fresco, is reported to have exclaimed that, in order to possess it, he would have given all his cavalry. It was probably the execution of this work which obtained for the painter the imperial title of Count Palatine.

The Count Giovanni Antonio Bazzi was next occupied on a small fresco on the outside wall of a house belonging to the guild of shoemakers, or Arte dei Calzolai.[42] On the wall at the corner of the Piazza Tolomei, he painted Madonna and her Divine Child, with the saints, John, Francis, Roch, and Crispin, the lawyer and patron of cobblers, with a shoe in his hand. Vasari praises the execution of this work, but the smoke and fumes of a laboratory which long existed immediately underneath it, have more than obliterated the outlines of the work.

In the year after he might have been found mounted upon a mighty scaffolding outside one of the city gates, that called Porta San Viene. It had originally been named Porta Pispini, but after the death of San Ansano, and the triumphal carrying of his body into the city, it is said to have been altered to a corruption of Il Santo Viene (The saint comes). It was originally called Porta Santa Eugenie, now Porta Pispini.

The Balia had been deliberating ever since 1526 about the painting in fresco of this gateway, and finally decided to give the commission to Sodoma, who had comported himself so well in the work he had left in the town hall.

Seated aloft, some sixty feet or more from the[76] ground, with large, broad touches of his brush, he drew a colossal “Nativity,” all the figures considerably larger than life-size.

A classic temple fills the middle distance; through the arches to the left is seen a group of ruins; to the right a landscape with another small peristyle temple. Immediately in front of this building kneels the Madonna, with clasped hands. Her outline is just decipherable, but all the colour has faded from her robe, and the Christ Child, who must have lain at her feet, has vanished entirely. Above are ranged groups of angels, singing from open scrolls of music, or with eyes uplifted to the soffit of the arch, where, within a glory, flies the figure of a child, symbolising The Word become Flesh.

On either side of this soffit are three groups of angels, who gaze and point downward to the scene of the Nativity on the wall. These groups of singing angels, now, like the lower part, faded into mere dim shadows, show, upon close examination from the scaffolding put up for restoration, very great beauty of outline and expression. The fresco bears the inscription: DEIPARAE VIRGINI pro victoria, libertate et salute hujus urbis, populus senensis ejus nomini devotus—A.D. M.D.XXXI.

As one of the bystanders he drew his own portrait, now elderly, and with a beard. In his hand was a brush, pointing to a small cartellino on which he had traced, Vasari says, the word Feci (I made it). Milanesi, or rather the commentators of Sansoni’s edition of Vasari, assert that this motto was Fac tu (Do thou likewise), and was a kind of bombastic challenge to his critics.

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It is possible that the honours which were now being showered upon him, and the ease with which he surpassed his fellow-painters in Siena may have turned the artist’s head. He had the disadvantage of standing alone, without that strenuous rivalry which the presence of other masters of equal merit would have necessitated. He went very rarely to Florence, where he was not liked, and he could paint so easily and so well when he chose, that it seemed hardly worth his while to make those laborious studies and drawings which should serve as a preparation for all thoughtful work. He now returned to San Bernardino to finish the series begun in 1518, and painted the last of the four large frescoes, that of the Virgin’s Coronation. From San Bernardino he went back to the Palazzo Pubblico to complete the third figure begun there five years before.

Upon the entrance wall of the Sala del Mappamondo, in the corner at right angles to his St. Victor, he had sketched a figure of San Bernardo Tolomei, standing, in white robes, book and crozier in hand, beneath a heavily ornamented portico, above which a group of putti are dancing. But with his characteristic inability to work for long together at any one subject, he had left this fresco half finished for more than four years, and the Signoria waxed impatient with him.

In a document preserved in the Archivio delle Riformagioni di Siena, is to be found this entry: “Finally, for our having been instrumental in causing the painter Sodoma to finish the painting of the Blessed Bernardo in the Sala del Mappamondo, he having already had eight scudi for it, which our predecessors have left a note of: and he, Sodoma, having now to[78] be paid the remainder for the work which he has meanwhile completed, may it so please your Magnificent Lordships so to ordain that the said Sodoma be paid for the laudable work, by Messer Francesco Tholomei, most worthy artisan of the cathedral church, according to what he has largely promised to us and to the said Sodoma.”

The adjective “laudable” is certainly not here out of place, for, evidently unwilling to put beside his colossal saints work of an inferior quality, he concentrated his attention sufficiently to produce a figure full of individuality and delicate sentiment, perhaps more successful in its expression than either of the other two.

Throughout 1535 he was still working in the Palazzo Pubblico, at the fine “Resurrection” which he now painted in one of the lower halls, the apartment used for the weighing and taxing of the salt.

There are the three coats-of-arms, all of the city of Siena, which were separated from this picture when it was moved, and are now to be found high up in an arch in a room not usually shown, where the registers are kept. In 1842 the fresco was sawn away from the wall where it was originally traced, and transported to a room on the first floor, now the office of the Mayor. The fresco is a large one, and the figures all life-size. The lid of the stone sarcophagus has been raised, and the rising figure of the Redeemer steps into the cold air of dawn. The face is not particularly attractive, but the whole figure is strong in its triumphant sense of new-born life and victory over the grave. This feeling of alertness[79] and swiftness is further accentuated by the drowsy attitudes of the three sleeping soldiers, one of whom half awakes to see the vision pass. The fresco is cold in colour, blues and stoney greys predominating, a faint light lies over the eastern sky, but the scene is illuminated by the yellow rays which stream from the Saviour’s own person. Its strength lies less in its colour than in its draughtsmanship, and the suggestion of energy without violence.

In the Morelli Collection at Bergamo there is a fine drawing in red chalk of this figure of the risen Lord.[43] It is evidently a study for this fresco or for the panel of the same subject at Naples, possibly the original study for both.

I have not been able to trace the history of the Naples pictures, for whom it was painted, or how it got to Naples. At the beginning of the last century it formed an altar-piece in the church of San Tommaso there, and has since been removed to the Pinacoteca and hung high up in a bad light. The composition is much the same as that of the Siena fresco, but there is a difference of pose in the figures of the two little angels who lean over the sarcophagus. The picture has suffered from neglect, but was evidently never equal in beauty to the Siena version. The soldiers are carelessly painted, completely out of drawing, and the figure of Our Lord lacks the dignity which the artist infused into the other. There is a cartellino with the inscription, Io ant. eques. ve (sic) AUCT. F.A. 1535.

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In 1536 we find him engaged in another long and wearisome lawsuit, this time with the brothers John and Arduino Arduini, rich Siennese merchants who, several years before, had got him to paint an altar-piece for a chapel belonging to them. This is the large “Adoration of the Magi” which now hangs in the Piccolomini chapel of St. Agostino. Apparently the brothers Arduini went back from the price originally agreed upon. Sodoma employed one of the most brilliant jurists of the age, Vannoccio Biringucci, to plead in his cause, but the action was, notwithstanding, decided against the painter, and the Arduini were absolved from further payment. But they were instructed to restore to Sodoma, on receipt from him of seven scudi, a circular panel with the Virgin, St. Elizabeth, and St. Joseph. This tondo has unfortunately vanished, and must have been one of his earlier productions.

To these years belong a really lovely panel in tempera washed over with glaces of oil, by some regarded as his last work of merit. Its date is uncertain; the warm, rich colouring, similar to that of his earlier years, and the careful modelling of the Virgin’s face has induced some critics to place it as early in his career as 1516-18. But Dr. Frizzoni, who is perhaps the authority most profoundly acquainted with Sodoma’s style, considers the looseness of its drawing and its want of luminosity in the shadows as indicative of late work. The picture was made for the altar of St. Calixtus in the cathedral, the last chapel on the right hand side, and was framed with a carved stone moulding of Renaissance design. In one of the restorations or[81] re-adjustments which were carried out in 1681 and 1704, it was taken away from the cathedral and put up in the little chapel in the Palazzo Pubblico, beside the frescoes of Bartolo di Fredi, and the carved choir-stalls.

Mancini says that Annibale Carracci could not tear himself away from this painting, but remained riveted before it, entranced by its poetic beauty and the charm of its landscape, which with the ruined amphitheatre recalls the fact that Sodoma had been in Rome.

In 1537 the Signoria gave him another small commission, a fresco above the door in the Sala dei Matrimoni. It was composed of a Madonna and Child, infant St. John, and Saints Ansano and Galgano, but is out of drawing, and the whole execution superficial. To this period of his life most probably we should date the fresco of the “Ascension” in the Collegiata of the Castello of Trequanda, and the altar-piece in the Collegiata of Asina-Lunga, which has a Madonna enthroned, two saints on either side, Sebastian and Anthony, Louis and Roch, and a little kneeling St. John in the centre, as well as the “Madonna and Child” of the Borghese Gallery, with the smiling Infant stretching out its hand for the rose which St. Joseph offers it over the Virgin’s right shoulder. This has a delightful landscape background, full of incident, and the hands are painted with care.

It would seem as if the tide of fortune had now turned against him. His work had already begun to deteriorate in quality, and from this time forth becomes more uniformly weak and vapid, and his inability to apply himself for long together at the same subject,[82] a drawback in his youth, in his old age became a veritable stumbling-block. He does not seem to have made any provision for his declining years.

In 1531, in response to some schedule for Income-Tax, he had drawn up a would-be comic list[44] of his possessions. The excessive bad taste of its jokes—the taste of the fifteenth century—strikes painfully on the modern ear. This list mentions an orchard, or rather farm, at Fonte Nuova, “which I till, and which others reap,” a house in the Vallerozzi quarter and eight horses. The remaining items are apes, crows, peacocks, owls, and “three evil beasts, which are three women.”

In 1534 he bought another house, but by 1537 both house and orchard seem to have passed out of his hands. His daughter was married, and, after the last coarse allusion, there is no further reference to his wife. His brothers and sisters were probably dead or lost to view, and Sodoma himself was sixty years of age.

One of his last works in Siena was the much damaged panel in the church of the Carmine, representing the “Birth of the Virgin.” The grouping of the figures and the drawing, especially of the woman in the foreground, who holds the child, reminds one forcibly of Raphael. There are seven persons in the picture, St. Anne in her bed, two women who bring her food, and three who are attending the little new-born child. Joachim peeps in upon the scene from behind the heavy curtain. In this painting the light issues from three different points; from the fire in front, which one does not see, but which casts its red glow upon the three foreground figures;[83] from the window behind St. Anne, and from the night-lamp under the bed. It looks as if the artist had been trying an experiment in some of those new effects of complex chiaro-oscuro, which were evoking such admiration at Rome.

In the early spring of 1537 the Signoria, consisting of the Chamber of Nobles and the Captain of the People, gave him his last commission, the painting of the little open chapel or loggia standing out from the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico.

On the 6th of March he was formally appointed to execute the work, and agreed to have it finished by the Feast of St. Mary, in August.[45] He was to paint a Madonna in the centre, flanked by the four patron saints of the city, with the Eternal Father in the lunette above. He was to provide his own materials—ultramarine included—and to be paid for it the sum of sixty scudi, fifteen on commencing the work, fifteen when half-way through, another fifteen when finished, and the final fifteen only to be granted him if the fresco was completed by the given date—a provision which shows us that the noble Signoria was already acquainted with his habits. On the 14th of March he was paid the first fifteen scudi, but there are no more entries of payment, and in the following year we find among the Archives published by Milanesi, a correspondence between the rulers of Siena, Sodoma himself, and the Prince of Piombino, with whom he was staying.[46] We have already alluded to the painter’s introduction to this prince, and the friendship which had sprung up between them.

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It was now in his moment of declining strength, when he found his power lessened and a group of younger men occupying that place in popular favour which had once been his, that the friend of years came forward and offered him a commission and the hospitality of his roof.

But the Signoria grew more and more impatient at the delay, and, tired of addressing peremptory letters to Sodoma himself which received no or evasive replies, attacked the Prince himself.

“Most excellent and magnificent Lords,” he answered them, “there is no doubt that the Cavalier Sogdona’s (sic) great wish to please me, and my own satisfaction in watching him perfect the panel so long promised me, has been the cause of the offence given to your excellent Lordships, not only by the Cavalier, but also by me, as accomplice in the fault. Whereas I, thinking it over and recognising myself to have been guilty, principally because this delay of his has been to suit my convenience, humbly confess that the obligation and the debt towards you have been mine. And still more so since the Cavalier on his part defends the error through his profession as an artist, who (as indeed often happens to poets) is so driven and constrained by his inspiration, that, even wishing to leave the work he has undertaken he is not able to do so. And I, enchanted and led away by his skill, have taken a liberty with your most excellent Lordships, in not urging him to go as soon as was needed. But I am convinced that he presents himself to your service with so much the greater fervour, that any delay will be more than compensated by the value and excellence[85] of his work. For this and for your goodwill towards me your Excellencies will be pleased to receive him graciously, (now that the cause of your indignation is removed) and he deserves it, seeing his power. So that I recommended him to you with all my heart, as a deserving man and personally dear to me. And as always a good son and servant I present and recommend myself to you.

The Prince of Piombino.

So the old man came back to the city of his adoption, where he had lived nearly forty years, and finished the fresco in the chapel of her nobles. Then, as Vasari says, he betook himself to Volterra, and painted for Messer Lorenzo di Galeotto dei Medici, a canvas with Phaeton falling headlong from the chariot of the sun.

The picture itself has long since vanished. It was last heard of in a list of pictures quoted by Della Valle in the seventeenth century, left by a Siennese citizen to his son (Lettere Senesi, iii. 267).[47]

A pen and ink drawing for the myth of Phaeton is to be found in the Uffizi collection, attributed to and even signed by Baldassare Peruzzi. Recent[86] criticism, however, has discovered this signature to be a modern forgery, and the drawing is now believed to be by Sodoma. It is not very likely, however, to bear any reference to this canvas referred to by Vasari, as it is obviously a study for a ceiling decoration, but is interesting as showing his treatment of this classical myth. M. Destailleur, an architect at Paris, has in his possession another drawing by Sodoma of this same subject. I have not had an opportunity of examining it, but Frizzoni declares it to be similar in taste and technique.

It may have been during this sojourn, that he repainted, for the Franciscan monks of Volterra, the Child in Signorelli’s fine panel of the “Circumcision,” now in our National Gallery. That this interpolation of one artist’s work over that of another, is a satisfactory method, one cannot maintain. The styles of the two masters were so utterly different, and their aims in art so alien, that one can but regret a vandalism of this kind which does justice to neither.

Several other small paintings in the Volterra churches have been attributed to Sodoma, but apparently without good reason, and critics of authority have rejected them as mere feeble copies, or the work of scholars. Certainly, in many of the little Tuscan towns round about Siena, exist oil paintings and fragments of frescoes which resemble, in one or two characteristics, the work of this prolific master.

A pupil studying under him, or some unknown admirer of his style, might easily become an imitator of his special mannerisms, and succeed in approaching very closely to the level of his feebler work, as in the[87] case of Riccio, with his exceedingly beautiful little fresco which lies upon the left wall of the collegiate church of Asciano.

Sodoma grew weary of staying at Volterra. He had been long accustomed to a roving life, and to work or not as the fancy moved him. Perhaps, kept as a dependant in the Volterra Castle, he too grew, like Dante, to know:

So he wandered away to Pisa, where he had never been, and where he had a friend in Messer Battista del Cervelliere, director of the Cathedral Board of Works. This gentleman introduced him to Messer Bastiano della Seta, chief architect of the cathedral, who was planning a series of scenes from Scripture history, to be painted in the spaces above the choir-stalls in the round apse. The paintings are in three tiers, divided by marble mouldings and gilt and carved pilasters. Bastiano della Seta gave him two really good commissions, a Pietà, immediately behind the High Altar, and a well-composed group at the side, on the lowest tier, representing the Sacrifice of Isaac.

“But,” says Vasari, waxing sententious over the supposed failure of these works, “Since these pictures did not succeed very well, the said master-workman, who had intended to order from him several panels for the church, dismissed him, well knowing that men who do not study, lose in their old age those qualities which[88] they had naturally in youth, and are left with a style and technique often but little to be praised.

“At the same time Giovanni Antonio completed a panel in oil which he had begun for Sta. Maria della Spina, making the Madonna with her Son in her arms, and kneeling before her St. Mary Magdalen and St. Catharine, and St. John, St. Sebastian, and St. Joseph standing at the sides, in all of which figures he succeeded much better than in those in the cathedral.”[49]

The two former are still in their place in the cathedral choir. The enthroned Madonna, with the six saints has been taken away from Sta. Maria della Spina, and hung in one of the side rooms of the Pisan Gallery. Vasari continues: “After this, having nothing more to do at Pisa, he went to Lucca; where, in St. Ponziano, a spot belonging to the brothers of Monte Oliveto, an abbot, who was a friend of his, made him paint a Madonna on the stairs going up to the dormitory.

“When he had finished this, weary, poor, and old, he went back to Siena, where he did not live long, since, being ill, and having nobody to take care of him, and nothing to live upon, he went to the great hospital, and there, in the course of a few weeks, he ended his life.”

Signor Ettore Romagnuoli discovered among the archives a letter which conclusively proves the date of the painter’s death to have been on the 14th of February 1549.

This letter was written by one, Ser Alessandro Buoninsegni, to his brother, Bernardino, Ambassador at[89] Naples, on the fifteenth of February, and states, “The Cavalier Sodoma died last night.”[50]

But the writer does not mention where he died, and we have only Vasari’s authority for the lonely end in the hospital, such as any pauper might have known.

GENERAL CHARACTER

In addition to the long list of frescoes and paintings which we have already considered and about which we have been able to obtain contemporary information, there still remains to be noted a small number of minor works, of but little relative value as examples of his art, but bearing some historical importance.

Chief among these are the various portraits of himself. The only thoroughly authenticated one is that of Monte Oliveto, painted, as we have seen, when five-and-twenty years of age, at the epoch of his first important commission. It is a young, rugged face, with blunt, plebeian features, full, however, of intelligence and some wistful thoughtfulness lying behind the eyes, in spite of the evident self-consciousness induced by the new clothes. There is a small panel portrait in the Uffizi, said to be his by some critics. The technique is heavier than was usual with him in middle life, but it is not altogether unlike the Monte Oliveto fresco, allowing for the face to have matured. The hair is long, in curls around the neck, and the short beard untrimmed. A dress of black, mingled with crimson velvet, the fine white shirt just showing at the throat, and a dark velvet cap, are set against a background of dark, sombre sky. It is a face grown thin, without refinement, a mouth still full and sensual in spite of the deep hollows under the eyes, as of[91] one who had suffered from neuralgic pain; but the eyes have the same look that they had in youth; there is the old contradiction in the face, even as in the work, the dual elements eternally at war.

The bearded head of the old man in the Pitti (No 382), also said to be a portrait of himself, is not recognised by critics of authority, nor does it bear much resemblance to the other two.

Local tradition has further associated his name with the peering head wedged in between the two tree trunks in his famous “Adoration of the Magi,” made for the brothers John and Arduino Arduini. Unlike their fellow-townsmen, these gentlemen were none too generous in their remuneration to the painters, and Bazzi, never having laid by a penny in his life, and possibly being in debt into the bargain, began the famous lawsuit against the Arduini.

This picture, so singularly fitted for the consideration of students, for it illustrates all his more noticeable characteristics, is still in the Piccolomini chapel of the church of Sant’ Agostino at Siena. The head above referred to is that of one of the shepherds, a subordinate personage rendered suddenly striking by some peculiar realism in its treatment.

It is neither a beautiful face nor a good face which looks from between the tree trunks away from the Madonna and towards the gaily harnessed horses led by negro slaves. But it is undoubtedly a portrait, and there are many who accept it as Sodoma’s own, in spite of its sharper features. But the Italian countenance, often full and puffy in early youth, is apt to assume in later life a sharpness of outline almost unrecognisable.[92] Della Valle speaks of two portraits of himself, one of them signed Giovanni Antonio da Vercelli, where he also declares the honour of his Siennese citizenship, and Vasari mentions that in the perished fresco at San Francesco, of which there only remains the fragment now in the Siena Gallery, Sodoma had drawn his own likeness, clean-shaven and with flowing hair.

Above the gate of San Viene we have another version of himself in his old age, bearing a brush in his hand, which points towards a cartellino with the words “Fac tu.” These various portraits, alternately with and without beard, but show that the painter was a close observer of current fashion, as befitted a Chevalier of the Pope’s creation and a Knight-at-arms, and they also enable us to follow his changeful physiognomy throughout a variety of phases.

There is a good deal of his work in England, chiefly in private collections. Our National Gallery is unfortunate in having but two very small and very poor specimens of the master’s work. They are not in any way representative. The “Madonna under the red canopy with the kneeling monk presented by St. Peter” is probably one of his late “pot-boilers.” It was originally in the Rosini 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.

The head of Christ, crowned with thorns, was probably part of a much larger picture, and has been remounted. It is evidently the central figure of a procession to Calvary, for the head is bent under the weight of a[93] large cross, the eyes are downcast, and the hands uplifted as if in prayer. Nevertheless, it is quite shallow in sentiment, and has none of that peculiar pathos and intensity with which his sincerer work is imbued.

There is, however, another fragment by Sodoma in the National Gallery,—the Child in Signorelli’s large altar-piece of the Circumcision. It appears that the Franciscan brothers, for whom this panel was painted, objected to Signorelli’s treatment of the infant Christ, and, on the plea of it having been spoiled by the damp (!), caused it to be repainted by Sodoma, who also touched up the Virgin’s face. Vasari gives the historical basis for this theory,[51] and upon a closer examination of the picture itself we may see that the attitude of the Child’s legs has been altered, the old outline showing through the Madonna’s robe, and the whole modelling is obviously by another hand.

It is to be regretted that our public galleries possess no worthier specimen of Sodoma’s work.

A very beautiful and highly-finished drawing is to be found, however, in the British Museum; in the same case as the four authentic Leonardos. It is in black chalk touched with white in the high lights, and represents the head of a youth, evidently a portrait. The nimbus, and the letters I.O. which have converted it into a saint are thought to be a later addition. The trustees of the Museum regard it as the portrait of Timoteo Viti by Raphael—probably because it was at one time in a private collection at Urbino, but Morelli has pointed out to us the fact that it is probably by Sodoma, and a careful examination of it, and the chalk[94] drawing in the Uffizi of the young man crowned with laurel, will, I think, show the same characteristics of line and shading.

Signor Morelli had himself two fine panels of Sodoma’s, which he left, together with the rest of his collection, to the public gallery at Bergamo. One of these is a “Madonna and Child” in the orthodox Lombard manner, so entirely Leonardesque in treatment that it was formerly counted among that master’s work. The other, a male head in oils, has traces of a certain Flemish tendency, a peculiar manner of laying on the colour which we may observe in the Frankfort portrait and in his early tondi at Siena. Besides these there are two drawings in red chalk, one for the figure of Christ in the “Resurrection,” the other of “St. Christopher crossing the stream.”

Signor Enrico Costa of Florence has a late work, a small panel depicting the half-length figure of the dead Christ upheld by the Virgin and Magdalen, a subject which Sodoma never approached in his early period, but which we find frequent after 1525.

In the sacristy of San Tommaso, Milan, there is a somewhat similar panel; and we have already described that belonging to Dr. Richter.

The public gallery of Genoa has possessed for some years a “Holy Family” classified among Sodoma’s late work. It formed part of a small collection left to the city by Prince Oddone di Savoia, brother of the late King; and Lady Layard has at Venice, among the collection of her late husband, a small panel of the “Virgin and Child surrounded by a glory of angels.”

In the vaulted offices under the great Hospital at[95] Siena, now belonging to the Societa di Eseguzione di Pia Disposizione, is to be found a “Madonna and Child with St. John,” painted on panel, a charming little picture of his late middle period, but which has been spoiled by the little St. John having been retouched and the flesh tints varnished until they are far too yellow. The Virgin holds the infant Christ, who playfully toys with St. John’s cross. St. Joseph in a yellow robe is seen behind the Virgin’s right shoulder, and to her left is an airy landscape, such as Sodoma loved to paint, with winding river, distant town upon the water’s edge with all its minutiæ—turret, buttress, and bridge.

Perhaps one of his most genial characteristics is this great delight in landscape, which was but another and probably less developed form of his love for nature shown in the fondness for animals. The tendency to look more and more at the external world was a growing one in his day, and painters of such opposite schools as Perugino, Leonardo, and Titian united in their poetic appreciation of natural scenery and their recognition of its harmony with man.

In Sodoma the natural beauty seems sometimes to outweigh the human interest, especially in much of his later work, where the figures are carelessly done. His stretches of country are nearly always painted with tenderness and care, as if in age he had grown weary of his intercourse with men and turned to the mute life of hill and lake and wind-swept plain for refreshment.

There is, finally, a small number of pictures by him quoted by early writers, which have either altogether disappeared, or else exist in remote corners under other names.

[96]

There are two early panels mentioned by Della Valle done for the Savini family, for which Antonio Barili carved the frames; the “Virgin and Child with St. Joseph holding a vase,” and a “Virgin and Child with St. Joseph, St. John Baptist, and St. Catherine of Siena.”

Then there was the small panel for the organ of San Francesco, of the “Virgin nursing her Child,” recently found by Mrs. Richter, and Della Valle also tells of a cassone, or marriage chest, decorated for one of the brides of the Saracini household, with scenes relative to the Judgment of Paris.

The picture representing Phaeton falling from the chariot of the Sun has already been mentioned (see p. 85).

Vasari, speaking of Sodoma’s friendship with James V. of Piombino, distinctly says that he painted sundry pictures for him, and in the correspondence between that Prince and the Signoria of Siena, we remember that James gives as an excuse for Sodoma’s delay in returning that he was so absorbed in the picture he was painting for him that he could not tear himself away from it. But we are not told the subject.

Baron Rumohr[52] speaks of having found at Siena certain fragments by Sodoma treating the metamorphoses of Cephalus, but I have not been able to trace them; and in the records of that lawsuit between the painter and the brothers Arduini we remember that part of Biringucci’s verdict was that the Arduini should restore to Sodoma a round panel representing the “Virgin and Child, with St. Joseph and St. Elizabeth.”

[97]

It is, on the whole, not easy to justly estimate the artistic position of a man so productive as Sodoma, and so extraordinarily unequal in his productions, without falling either into the error of viewing him too completely in the light of his inferior work, and so underrating his masterpieces, or that of extending an unmerited value to all that came from his hand. He has suffered from literary injustice in Vasari’s biassed criticism, he has suffered from technical contempt through his own defect of over-production, and consequent inequality. The mere fact that his life was a long one, and his paintings far too numerous, has crowded out, in popular estimation, the memory of those few works of absolute genius on which his higher reputation rests.

And much that has been put down to Sodoma’s wayward individuality may, in reality, be attributed to the general tendencies of his age and the society in which he lived. It is undeniable that the really great man, the hero, guides, rather than is guided by, his environment; but we have not claimed for Sodoma a position among the greatest.

And one has to bear in mind, also, that what his contemporaries sought in art was less the edification of the mind than the pleasure of the eye. The sensuousness that had entirely taken possession of Italian literature was spreading now into the more lately developed field of painting, and the criticism of either art was directed rather towards its beauty of form, pleasing line or ringing metre, than to the idea or sentiment expressed. Painting especially, in seeking thus exclusively for mere plastic beauty, was losing touch more and[98] more with thought, and, as it became less intellectual, beginning to lose also some of the highest qualities of beauty.

The whole of Siennese art had been from the beginning less thoughtful, less literary than the Florentine; it was the emotional expression of simpler natures not trained in the subtleties of feeling which the combined influence of the Florentine scholastics and Greek revivalists had brought about. Siena awoke late to a knowledge of the classics, and suffered much less than Florence and Venice from that form of religious eclecticism which ended in artistic insincerity. But even Siena on her hill-tops could not escape the general tide of thought which was sweeping over Europe, and in the transition from the mediæval to the modern standpoint, she, too, passed through her phase of uncertainty and affectation.

Sodoma came at the beginning of this phase. What was best in him held to the old tradition, the sincerity of the Middle Ages. The practical side of him, the obvious need of bread, carried him along with the tide; and the sincerity which is found in modern art, the poetry of realism, was as yet undiscovered. Hence the anomalous character of his painting, the indecision of his mental bias.

He left a great deal that was showy and trivial; he was often unequal in the different parts of a picture itself, frequently throwing all his skill into the working of a central figure and dashing in the subordinate subjects hurriedly, as in St. Anna in Creta; or else working but half-heartedly at the ostensible motiv, and concentrating his energy upon the perfection of some[99] lesser group, as in the Descent into Hades. He had all the advantages and all the defects of an over-rich artistic imagination, and a bias towards the subtle and mystic which often degenerated into the production of what was merely weak.

The sensuality with which not only Vasari but contemporary poems tax him was probably an integral part of his character, the ardent, fiery, impressionable artist-nature, as quick to throw itself into extremes of degradation as to rise to sublimest heights of intuitive faith.

It is the same temperament which we find in St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Bernardino, the vitality which, ill-directed, secures us the libertine, and, chastened and inspired, supplies the saint.

Sodoma did not become a saint; he remained a sinner and a reprobate to the end of his life, and died poor and neglected in the public infirmary. What in others developed into a feverish and ardent piety, in him remained forever merely potential. It sufficed, however, to give a particular character to his art. His strength can never be said to have lain in dramatic grouping or even in proportion of composition. His abundant fancy led him often to overcrowd his canvas, and a violent two-fold action going on at the same time induces a great feeling of restlessness in most of his larger works. He was at his best in the portrayal of single figures, overwhelmed by some profound or subtle emotion; St. Catherine swooning in the excess of her religious fervour, Eve bewildered as she first steps into the light of day, St. Sebastian uplifted in the wonder of his martyrdom, or, most profound of all,[100] Our Lord in the hands of the scourgers. If he could not invest his Madonnas with the great purity of Perugino or Botticelli’s solemn thoughtfulness, he could at least paint men and women under the influence of strong and exalted passion, the mysterious sweetness of whose faces haunts one with persistent power. Unfortunately, Sodoma, as Rio observes, was too often content to sacrifice quality to quantity, and, amid all his work, there are only some five or six of his paintings which can take their place among the great works of the century.

But it is through the merits of these that his claim to greatness lies, and one has grown to associate with his name a sense of the dignity of suffering and the majesty of human nature at its moments of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Wherever humanity has escaped from its daily round to reach a supreme crisis of noble emotion, the artist became, as it were, inspired by his subject and rose to the occasion in art that was both spiritual and strong.

[101]

BUDA PESTH, ESTERHAZY COLLECTION.

VIENNA, ALBERTINA.

VIENNA, BELVEDERE.

[104]

BRITISH ISLES.

LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY.

BRITISH MUSEUM (PRINT ROOM).

OXFORD, CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY.

WINDSOR.

[105]

SIR FRANCIS COOK, DOUGHTY HOUSE, RICHMOND.

WALTER SICHEL, Esq., 50 EGERTON GARDENS, S.W.

DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, CHATSWORTH.

CAPTAIN HOLFORD, DORCHESTER HOUSE, PARK LANE, LONDON.

[106]

COLONEL H. CORNWALL LEGH, HIGH LEGH HALL, KNUTSFORD.

DR. RICHTER, 14 HALL ROAD, ST. JOHN’S WOOD, LONDON.

EARL OF WEMYSS, GOSFORD HOUSE, SCOTLAND.

FRANCE.

PARIS, LOUVRE.

CHAMBERY, MARQUIS COSTA DE BEAUREGARD.

GERMANY.

BERLIN, GALLERY.

FRANKFORT, STAEDEL INSTITUTE.

HANOVER, GALLERY.

HAMBURG, HERR COUNCILLOR WEBER.

MUNICH, GALLERY.

[108]

(Print Room.)

WEIMAR, PALACE.

ITALY.

ASINA-LUNGA, COLLEGIATA.

BERGAMO, BIBLIOTECA LOCHIS.

BERGAMO, MORELLI COLLECTION.

[109]

FLORENCE, UFFIZI.

Drawings. In upper room:—

FLORENCE, REFECTORY, MONTE OLIVETO.

FLORENCE, SIGNOR ENRICO COSTA’S COLLECTION.

FLORENCE, PITTI PALACE.

[111]

GENOA, GALLERY.

SAN GEMIGNANO, PRISON CHAPEL.

SAN GEMIGNANO, ON THE WALL OF LOGGIA OPPOSITE COLLEGIATA.

MILAN, BRERA.

MILAN, DR. FRIZZONI.

[112]

MILAN, GINOULHIAC FAMILY.

MILAN, AMBROSIANA.

MILAN, SAN TOMMASO.

NAPLES, GALLERY.

PISA, CATHEDRAL.

[113]

PISA, MUSEO CIVICO.

ROME, CAMERA DELLA SEGNATURA, VATICAN.

ROME, VILLA BORGHESE.

ROME, BARBERINI GALLERY.

[114]

ROME, VILLA FARNESINA.

ROME, DONNA LAURA MINGHETTI.

ROME, PALAZZO CHIGI.

ROME, PALAZZO SPADA.

[115]

SIENA, GALLERY.

SIENA, ST. AGOSTINO.

SIENA, SAN BERNARDINO.

(In Sacristy.)

SIENA, CHURCH OF THE CARMINE.

[119]

SIENA, SAN DOMENICO.

(In Sacristy.)

[120]

(Cappella del Rosario.)

SIENA, SAN GIOVANNI AND GENNARO.

SIENA, SALA DEL MAPPAMONDO, PALAZZO PUBBLICO.

(Chapel.)

(Sala dei Matrimoni.)

(Sala del Presidente.)

(Cappella dei Nobili.)

SIENA, SPANISH CHAPEL, SAN SPIRITO.

A group of paintings consisting of:

Lunette—

At right hand side—

On left hand—

Lunette above altar—

[123]

On right hand—

On left hand—

SIENA, HOSPITAL.

SIENA, PORTA SAN VIENE.

SIENA, CASA BAMBAGINI.

[124]

SIENA, ARTE DEI CALZOLAI, PIAZZA TOLOMEI.

SIENA, VILLA GRICCIOLI. (Formerly the Monastery of S. Eugenio.)

SIENA, ST. ANNA IN CRETA.

To right—

To left—

Above the entrance—

[125]

To right—

To left—

In soffit of arch—

SIENA, MONTE OLIVETO, MAGGIORE, CLOISTER.

A series of frescoes representing—

On stairs—

[130]

On cloister arch—

TURIN, GALLERY.

TREQUANDA, CASTELLO DI, COLLEGIATA.

VAPRIO, VILLA MELZI.

VENICE, LAYARD COLLECTION.

[132]

VERCELLI, COLLECTION OF SIGNOR AVOCATO ANT. BORGOGNA.

ST. ANNA IN CRETA

Extract from the Archives of the Monastery:

“L’ anno 1503 a di 1 Luglio, D. Andrea Coscia da Napoli, cellerario di S. Anna, convenne con maestro G. A. da Vercelli, pittore, delle pitture da farsi in refectorio di S. Anna, per sc. 20 d’ oro e le spese. E del tutto ne appare una scritta di mano del detto cellerario segnata con questo segno * ... sc. 140¼.”

Libro Lungo. Segnato O. fol. 95 a tergo.

MONTE OLIVETO

Document referring to the appointment of Sodoma:

“Habitu tamen hoc tertia ejus electionias (Anno 1505 idibus aprilis), aliquanta et temporis inter capedine et pecuniarum commoditate ... incoeptum, ut sapientis est, tandem opus complere decrevit. Et orientalem merdionalemque claustri partem, etsi diverso pictore, haud tamen inferiore pictura decoravit. Et nisi pictoris incuria adfuisset, universum ut optabat, jam jam perfectum esset opus.” M. I. p. 75.

Document referring to payment:

1505 Giovan Antonio dipentore del nostro claustro deve havere per una historia, quale ha facta ne la faccia verso l’ uscio del Refectorio, civè la prima dove sonno le donne che ballano, ducati due d’ accordo: cosi £70.

Item deve havere per septe altre historie ne la medesima facciata, a rasone di ducati septe la historia: lire 343.

E più deve havere ducati septanta sette per undici historie, quali ha facte nel claustro verso el dormitorio de’ vecchi: che sono lire, 539.

E più de’ havere docati otantaquatro d’ oro che sono per dodici storie che lui ha fate nel claustro soprascripto: che sono lire 588. Partite tratte gia dai Libri dell’ Archivio del Monastero di Mont’ Oliveto Maggiore.

[139]

Document referring to his Marriage:

1. 1510 28th October.

Johannes Antonius Jacobi de Bazis, pictor de Verzé fuit confessius habuisse et recepisse pro dotibus domine Beatricis, olim filie Luce Bartolomei Egidii, et sorori Bartholomei et Nicholai filiorum dicte Luce—florenos 450 de libri quatuor pro floreno. Arch. de’ Contratti di Siena. Rogito di Ser Alessandro della Grammatica filza dal 1507 al 1515, No. 61.

2. Same date.

Johannis Antonius Jacobi de Bazis, pictor habitator civitatis Senarum, fuit confessius habuisse pro dotibus domine Beatricis filie. Luce Bartolomei Egidii alias Luce de Galli flor 450 de libri quatuor pro floreno. Arch. del Registro da Siena. Libro delle Gabelle de’ Contratti ad annum, a. c. 103.

A descriptive list of the horses which Sodoma ran the palio of St. Ambrogio, 1513:

Soddome: unus equos leardus moscatus, ragazzius: Baptista.

Soddome: unus equos morellus, ragazzius: Betto.

1527, unus equos leardus pomellatus sfregiatus: ragazzius, Tempestino di Modena.

Arch. de’ Contr. di Siena. Sessione dei quattro di Biccherna, tra le carte di Ser Achille Bertini.

Document relating to the figures of the Apostles to be cast for the Cathedral. 1515 22 di Giugno.

Deliberaverunt locare ... magistro Johanni Antonio alias Sodoma pictori, ad faciendum unam figuram unius apostoli brunzii in Ecclesia Cathedrali cum illis conditionibus prout locata fuit Jacobo Cozzarelli. Item locaverunt aliam figuram, et hoc ad beneplacitum operariorum, si ipsis videbitur. Et quod ipse Johannis Antonius teneatur docere quatuor pueros dicti Operis Gratis, et sine ullo premio ad pingendum. Arch. dell’ Opera del Duomo. Libro di Memorie segnato E-G. a. c. 28 verso.

Documenti—San Bernardino:

1518-31 Dicembre.

Il di detto (31 dic.) ducati trenta si fanno buoni a Messer Giovantonio detto Soddoma per sua Manifattura della Storia de l’oferta del tempio della Vergine Maria fatta più di fa.

Ducati 35 si fanno buoni a Messer Giovannantonio detto che sonno per sua Manifattura de la storia de la incoronazione della Vergine Maria.

Ducati 10 a Messer Giovannantonio detto Soddoma per sua Manifattura della Storia di S. Francesco de la finestra.

[140]

Duc. 14 a Messer Giovannantonio detta per la sua manifattura di St. Lodovico chola finestra.

Duc. 8 per la Manifattura della Storia di S. Antonio di Padua.

Archivio del patrimonio ecclesiastico. Compagnia di S. Bernardino. Registro C. Entrata e Uscita. Carta 28.

S. BERNARDO TOLOMEI

1534.

Ultimamente per haver ancora noi procurato che la pittura del beato Bernardo ne la sala del Mappamondo fusse finita dal Soddoma dipentore de la quale ne ha gia avuto scudi otto, sicome da’ precessori nostri ne era stato lassato in notula; et havendo esso Sodoma a esser satisfatto del restante di detta opera quale ne ha condotta a perfettione: piacerà a V. S. Magnifiche fare che detto Soddoma sia fatto satisfare de la lodevole opera da Messer Francesco Tholomei dignissimo operaio de la Chiesa Cathedrale, si come esso a noi et ad detto Sodoma ne ha largamente promesso.

Arch. delle Riformagioni di Siena. Scritture Concistoriali, No. 51. Notula ai sucessori della Signoria ad annum.

CAPPELLA DEI NOBILI

1536-37, 14 di Marzo.

Per parte de li spettatissimi quattro cittadini operari e comissari del l’ illustrissimo concistoro dei Magnifici Signori ... a fare dipingere l’ altare della Cappella della piazza pubblica deputati—voi Crescenzio Turamini, date e pagate al generoso cavaliere messer Giovannantonio Soddoma, pittore, deputato a dipengere decto altare, scudi 15, cioè scudi quindici quali se li danno a buon conto, e per dar principio alia detta opera, secondo le convenzioni fatte con detti operai.

Arch. dotto Scritture Concistoriali. Filza 55, ad annum.

1537.

Spese si faranno e fecionsi a la Cappella di Piazza per dipignerla a di XVII. di Setembre Lire tre che se li fan buoni a Ugo Berti nostro Camerlingo che li pagò a Pier Giovanni scarpellino per rompere el archo del nicchio.

1539, 2 Aprile.

Lire cinquantasei, se li fan buoni a Ugo Berti camerlingo che li pagò â Messer Giovannantonio Sodoma, dipentore, per resto de la dipegnitura de la chapelle di Piazza.

Arch. dell’ Opera del Duomo, libro giallo detto dell’ assunta a carte, 369.

• Adoration of the Magi (S. Agostino, Siena), 50, 80, 91, 116, ill. 50
• Alexander, Family of Darius before (Farnesina), 35, 114, ill. 34
• Alexander, Marriage of (Farnesina), 33, 114, ill. 32;
• sketches for, 34, ill. 32
• Arduini, The, their lawsuit against Sodoma, 80, 91
• Aretino, Pietro, his friendship with Sodoma, 33
• Ascension (Trequanda), 81, 131
• Assumption of the Virgin, The (San Bernardino), 49, 117, ill. 50
• Balducci, apprenticed to Sodoma, 47
• Bazzi, Giovanni Antonio. See Sodoma
• Beccafumi, 3, 71;
• associated with Sodoma, 48
• Bernazzano, 14
• Biers, Panels for, by Sodoma, 62
• Biringucci, Vannoccio, 80
• Birth of the Virgin (Carmine), 82, 118
• Bramantino, 27
• Brazzi, Lorenzo, pupil of Sodoma, 47
• Bruzza, Don Luigi, on Sodoma’s early life, 3-6
• Camera della Segnatura, Sodoma’s decorations in, 27, 28, 113, ill. 26
• Carracci, Annibale, 3, 81
• Cesare da Sesto, 14
• Charity (Berlin), 46, 62, 107
• Chigi, Agostino, 3, 26, 27, 29, 32
• Chigi, Prince Mario, 36
• Christ bearing the Cross (Monte Oliveto), 19, 130
• Christ bound to the Column (Siena Gallery), 2, 21, 43, 116, ill. 44;
• (Monte Oliveto), 19
• Christ, Head of (Nat. Gallery), 92, 104
• Christ in Hades (Siena Gallery), 21, 61, 115, ill. 60
• Circumcision, The, by Signorelli, 86, 93;
• the Child repainted by Sodoma, 86, 93
• Coronation of the Virgin, The (Monte Oliveto), 19, 129;
• (San Bernardino, Siena), 117, ill. 50
• Darius, the Family of, 35, 114, ill. 34
• Della Quercia, Jacopo, 10
• Del Piombo, Sebastiano, 23, 32
• Descent from the Cross, The (Siena Gallery), 12, 115, ill. 12
• Descent into Hades (Siena Gallery), 21, 61, 115, ill. 60
• Farnesina, Building of the, 32;
• frescoes in, 32, 33
• Female Portrait (Frankfort), 23, 107
• Ferrara, Alfonso, Duke of, 52, 54
• Flagellation of Our Lord, The, 43
• Gethsemane (Siena Gallery), 61, 115
• Gianpietrino, 14, 46
• Giovanone, 7
• Gonzaga, Marquis Francesco, 45, 53
• Holy Family (Vercelli), 13, 131
• Holy Family with S. John, etc. (Capt. Holford), 14, 105;
• (Col. Cornwall Legh), 14, 105;
• (Villa Borghese), 80, 113, ill. 82
• Holy Family (Genoa), 94, 111;
• (Hospital, Siena), 95, 123
• Judgment of Pilate, The, 43
• Last Supper, The (Monte Oliveto, Florence), 41, 110, ill. 40
• Leda (Villa Borghese), 21, 37, 113;
• drawings for, 37, 62
• Leo X., 3, 40
• [142]Leonardo da Vinci, Influence of on Sodoma, 7, 35;
• picture of Leda attributed to, 37;
• drawings of Leda, 37, 38;
• at Piombino, 40
• Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 70
• Lorenzo di Credi, 14
• Lucretia, Paintings of, by Sodoma, 45, 46
• Madonna and Child (Brera), 28, 29, 111, ill. 28;
• (San Gemignano), 32;
• (Turin), 38, 130;
• (Munich), 39, 107;
• (Ginoulhiac collection, Milan), 57, 112;
• (Vaprio), 55, 131;
• (Villa Borghese), 81, 113, ill. 82;
• (Nat. Gallery), 92, 104;
• (Bergamo), 94, 108;
• (Layard collection), 94, 131;
• (Mrs. Richter), 10, 96, 106;
• (Asina-Lunga), 81, 108
• Madonna and Child with Saints (Turin), 31, 130, ill. 30;
• (Pisa), 88, 113, ill. 88
• Madonna in Glory with Saints (Uffizi), 60, 109, ill. 60
• Madonna and S. Leonard (Palazzo Pubblico), 80, 81, 121, ill. 80
• Madonna and Child with S. John (Palazzo Pubblico), 81, 121, ill. 82
• Madonna with S. Peter and S. Michael (Monte Oliveto), 20
• Magagni, Girolamo, pupil of Sodoma, 47, 67, 68
• Male Head (Bergamo), 94, 108
• Melozzo da Forlì, 28
• Melzi, Francesco, 55
• Michelangelo, 9, 27, 32, 35
• Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes (S. Anna in Creta, Siena), 16, 124
• Monte Oliveto (Siena), Frescoes by Sodoma at, 18-23
• Morelli, Analysis of Sodoma’s characteristics by, 23-25
• Nativity, The (Siena Gallery), 13, 115, ill. 14;
• (Porta San Viene, Siena), 76, 123
• Pacchia, Frescoes in San Bernardino by, 48, 50
• Pacchiarotto, fresco of San Bernardino by, ill. 56
• Penitent Magdalen (Dr. Frizzoni, Milan), 56, 111
• Persecution of Rhea Silvia, The (Chigi Palace, Rome), 36, 114
• Peruzzi, Baldassare, 32, 46, 65, 85
• Petrucci, The, of Siena, 53, 57
• Phaeton, The Fall of (lost picture), 85, 96;
• drawings for, 85, 86
• Piccolomini, Portraits of the, 51
• Pietà (Pisa Cathedral), 13, 87, 112;
• (S. Anna in Creta, Siena), 17, 124;
• (Monte Oliveto), 20;
• (Villa Borghese), 63, 113;
• (Casa Bambagini), 64, 123;
• drawings for, 63, ill. 62;
• (Costa collection), 94, 110;
• (San Tommaso, Milan), 94, 112
• Pinturicchio, 9, 26
• Piombino, Prince of, 3, 40, 83, 96
• Presentation in the Temple, The (San Bernardino), 48, 117, ill. 48
• Procession to Calvary, The (Siena, Villa Griccioli), 61, 124
• Raphael, Portrait of Sodoma in the School of Athens by, 3, 28;
• frescoes in the Farnesina, 32;
• influence of on Sodoma, 35, 36, 72;
• portrait drawing of Timoteo Viti wrongly attributed to, 93
• Resurrection (Palazzo Pubblico), 78, 121, ill. 76;
• (Naples), 79, 112;
• study for, 94
• Riccio, son-in-law of Sodoma, 30, 47, 71, 87
• Roxana, Alexander and, 33, 114, ill. 32;
• study for, ill. 32
• Sacrifice of Isaac (Pisa), 87, 112, ill. 86
• S. Anna in Creta, Siena, frescoes by Sodoma at, 16, 124
• S. Anne Enthroned (S. Anna in Creta, Siena), 17, 125
• S. Ansano (Palazzo Pubblico), 71, 120, ill. 72
• S. Benedict, Scenes in the Life of (Monte Oliveto), 18-22, 125-129, ill. 16, 18, 20
• [143]San Bernardino, Frescoes in the Oratory of, 48, 117
• San Bernardino, by Pacchiarotto, ill. 56
• San Bernardo instituting his Order (Monte Oliveto), 20, 130
• S. Catherine, Scenes in the Life of (San Domenico), 64, 66, ill. 64, 66, 68
• S. Catherine, The Vision of, 2, 65, 119, ill. 64
• S. Christopher (Spada Gallery, Rome), 36, 114;
• study for, 94
• San Domenico, Siena, Sodoma’s work in, 64-67, 119
• S. George and the Dragon (Sir F. Cook), 46, 51, 54, 105
• S. Ives (San Gemignano), 31, 111
• S. Louis of Toulouse (San Bernardino, Siena), 118, ill. 54
• S. Sebastian (Uffizi), 2, 21, 58, 109, ill. Front., 58;
• (Spanish Chapel, Siena), 74, 122
• S. Victor (Palazzo Pubblico), 70, 71, 120, ill. 70
• Salutation, The (San Bernardino), 49, 117, ill. 48
• School of Athens, The, by Raphael, 3, 28
• Scorel, Jan, 23
• Signorelli, Frescoes at Monte Oliveto, by, 18;
• his Circumcision, 86, 93
• Sodoma, disliked by Vasari, 2, 3;
• highly esteemed by contemporaries, 3;
• his birth, 3;
• apprenticed to Spanzotti, 6;
• influence of Leonardo on, 7;
• work at Siena, 8;
• his love of animals, 10, 22;
• early works, 10-14;
• portraits, 15;
• frescoes at S. Anna in Creta, 16;
• frescoes at Monte Oliveto, 18-22;
• female portrait at Frankfort, 23;
• Morelli’s analysis of the characteristics of, 23-25;
• taken to Rome by Chigi, 27;
• decorations in the Camera della Segnatura, 27, 28;
• return to Siena and marriage, 29;
• second visit to Rome, 32;
• friendship with Aretino, 33;
• frescoes in the Farnesina, 33-36;
• influence of Leonardo and Raphael on, 35, 36;
• visit to Piombino, 40,
• and Florence, 40;
• fresco of the Last Supper, at Monte Oliveto (Florence), 41;
• origin of his name, 42, 43;
• frescoes at San Francesco, 43;
• Christ bound to the Column, 43, 45;
• his treatment of the human figure, 44, 45;
• Lucretia, 45;
• made Cavalliere di Cristo by Leo X., 45;
• Charity, 46;
• his pupils, 47;
• the San Bernardino frescoes, 48;
• the Adoration of the Magi, 50;
• S. George and the Dragon, 51;
• disappearance from Siena, 53;
• doubtful works at Milan, 55;
• return to Siena, 57;
• S. Sebastian, 58-60;
• frescoes in San Domenico, 64-67;
• action against Magagni, 67-68;
• decorations in the Palazzo Pubblico, 70 et seq.;
• frescoes in the Spanish chapel, 72, 73;
• made a Count by the Emperor, 75;
• other frescoes in Siena, 75;
• later works, 80-88;
• comic list of his possessions, 82;
• last commission from the Signoria of Siena, 83;
• friendship of the Prince of Piombino for, 84;
• at Volterra, 85,
• and Pisa, 87;
• his death, 88;
• portraits of himself, 90-92;
• works in English collections, 92, 93;
• minor works, 94;
• lost pictures, 95, 96;
• general character, 97
• Sodoma, Portraits of, by himself, 90, ill. 90
• Spanzotti, Sodoma apprenticed to, 6
• Tamagni, Vincenzo, 30
• Tolomei, San Bernardo, 64, 72, 77, 121
• Tizioni, The, 6
• Vasari, his dislike of Sodoma, 2, 3;
• account of Sodoma’s eccentricities, 10;
• his injustice to Sodoma, 43

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