Word: sodoma
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Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone...
...Catholics and Communists alike. In 1961 his first major film, Accattone, drew clerical criticism for its romanticizing of pimps and prostitutes. Three years later Pasolini made The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which angered the left with its reverence. Just before his death, he completed The 120 Days of Sodoma, based on a Marquis de Sade work and set in Italy's Fascist...
Last week Siena, his home town, celebrated the 401st anniversary of Il Sodoma's death with a full-dress retrospective exhibition drawn from France and Germany as well as Italy. Along with the 70-odd paintings and drawings on show was a batch of personal documents that proved him to have been the luxury product of a wide-open age; lazy, cynical, proud, humorous and wild...
...grudgingly described as "no little facility." He kept a string of race horses, and pets by the dozen: jays, apes, badgers, squirrels, marmosets, turtle doves, and a raven which he taught to answer the door. In an inventory of goods filed with the Siena tax collector in 1512, Il Sodoma also listed "a donkey that talks theology to the priests...
When he was low in funds, II Sodoma gave in to the pleas of his admiring patrons and worked a bit. He had well assimilated the painting techniques of his consistently great contemporaries, Da Vinci and Raphael. He had once taken the trouble to copy Da Vinci's painting of Leda, which has since been lost, and II Sodoma's copy was long mistaken for the original. He could draw, when he cared to, with serene accuracy; he knew how to round out shapes by blurring their contours (sfumato), and how to steep his fingers in rippling depths...