Nosadella

Even his name comes from a street. Giovanni Francesco Bezzi was called Nosadella, apparently after Via Nosadella in Bologna, where he lived, and very little else about his life is documented. He was probably born around 1530, and in 1549 he enrolled in the Quattro Arti, the Bolognese guild that included painters.

He was a pupil of Pellegrino Tibaldi, a Bolognese painter and architect, and for a long time their pictures were confused, with Nosadella treated as a mere follower. His Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist in Indianapolis, painted around the 1550s, shows the hand scholars now recognise as his own. Mary turns her back to the viewer while the restless Child reaches behind her. When he died in 1571, his Circumcision for the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bologna was still unfinished, and Prospero Fontana, a leading Bolognese painter, completed it.