Il Sodoma

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi was born in Vercelli, in Piedmont, in 1477. He trained in the workshop of the minor Piedmontese painter Giovanni Martino Spanzotti, roughly from 1490 to 1497, which is the only documented formal training in his career; no university or academy education is recorded. He moved to Siena early in his career and, aside from a period working in Rome, spent most of his working life there.

Around 1508 to 1512 he worked in Rome on fresco decoration for the Vatican apartments, including ceiling work in the Stanza della Segnatura that was later largely overpainted as Raphael took over the room's decoration. He was later knighted by Pope Leo X during a stay in Florence, where he was received in the household of Giuliano de' Medici; sources do not tie the knighthood to a specific year or directly to the Vatican commission. He returned to Siena, where his major later commissions include the 1513 Deposition from the Cross and Christ Scourged for the Basilica di San Francesco, the fresco cycle depicting Saint Catherine of Siena completed in 1526 for the Chapel of St. Catherine in the Basilica di San Domenico, and, working alongside Pacchia and Beccafumi between 1536 and 1538, scenes from the life of the Virgin at the Oratorio di San Bernardino. In 1525 he contracted to paint a double-sided processional banner for the Compagnia di San Sebastiano in Camollia, near Siena.

The sobriquet by which he is known, Il Sodoma, is documented in Giorgio Vasari's Lives, which attributes it to an accusation against the artist and states that Bazzi embraced rather than rejected the name, signing works with it himself. Modern historians have questioned the reliability of Vasari's account on this point, and the underlying episode is not independently corroborated beyond Vasari's telling, but the name itself is an inseparable, documented part of how the artist has been known for five centuries.

Il Sodoma died in Siena in February 1549. Major reference sources disagree on the exact day, with some giving 14 February and others 15 February; a contemporary letter cited by the Treccani Dizionario Biografico, written from Siena on 15 February 1549, reports the death as having occurred "questa notte" (that night), which points to 14 or 15 February depending on interpretation. The month, year, and place of death are not in dispute.

Vasari's Lives, written within a generation of the artist's death, is the foundation of his critical reputation, praising the quality of his work in Siena and Rome while also giving the fullest account of his personal reputation and the origin of his nickname. Later art history has situated him as a key transitional figure, with commentators noting that his easel paintings, including a Holy Family long confused with Leonardo's circle, show the direct imprint of Leonardo's Milanese manner, while his late Sienese fresco cycles move toward a more Mannerist figural language. The 2026 retrospective at the Fondazione Accorsi-Ometto in Turin, bringing together works from museums and private collections across his Piedmontese, Sienese, and Roman periods, signals renewed institutional attention to his full career rather than only his best-known Sienese frescoes.

Il Sodoma's market is that of a rare Old Master whose work rarely appears at auction; the great majority of his surviving output is in museums and, especially, in Sienese churches and oratories that still hold the frescoes and altarpieces in situ. No specific, independently verified auction record for the artist could be confirmed as of this writing; auction-database listings for the artist exist on platforms such as Invaluable and askART, but lot-level sale details (work, price, house, and date) were not retrievable for verification. As a painter who died in 1549, he has no modern gallery or estate representation; when panels or drawings attributed to him do surface, they are typically handled by Old Master specialist departments at major auction houses or by Old Master dealers rather than by a representing gallery.

Because Il Sodoma is a sixteenth-century painter whose major works are largely fixed in churches, oratories, and museum collections, the pool of works that can ever change hands privately is very small, and any auction appearance is a rare event rather than a routine market data point. There is no catalogue raisonne, so attribution depends on archival documentation, provenance history, and expert connoisseurship, and this should be weighed carefully alongside condition when a panel or drawing is offered. Given the thin trading history and the absence of a verified public auction record, collectors should treat any reported sale price for this artist with caution and confirm it against a primary auction-house source before relying on it.