Il Sodoma

The painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi is almost always called by a nickname, Il Sodoma, and we owe much of his prickly reputation to Giorgio Vasari, who disliked him and said so at length in his famous lives of the artists. Vasari painted him as a vain, dissolute keeper of exotic animals, a portrait later writers have treated with caution.

The paintings themselves are graceful and often lovely. At the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Tuscany he frescoed a long cycle of the life of Saint Benedict, full of lively, worldly detail. In Rome, for a rich banker's villa, he painted the wedding night of Alexander the Great and Roxana, one of the most sensuous scenes of the High Renaissance.

He spent most of his career in and around Siena, a little apart from the Florentine and Roman mainstream. He died in Siena in 1549, and even Vasari, for all his scorn, admitted the man could paint when he chose to.