Félibien’s Biography of ‘Le Sodoma’ and the Politics of Immorality

André Félibien’s  Entretiens sur les vies et les œuvres des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes  are known to have been modelled after Giorgio Vasari’s  Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects  (first edition 1550; second expanded and illustrated edition 1568). In the fourth  Entretien , published in 1672, 1  there is a brief biography of an Italian artist whom Félibien calls ‘Le Sodoma’. This was the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549), born in Vercelli, whose works were commissioned by several Popes, including Leo X, who named him a  Cavaliere di Cristo . Bazzi was the subject of a chapter in the second edition of Vasari’s Lives, published in 1568, 2  in which Vasari referred to Bazzi by the nickname of ‘Il Soddoma’,...