Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, known as “Il Nosadella”

We know very little about Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, known as Il Nosadella after the street in Bologna in which he lived (c. 1525–49). The archives contain only scant, fragmentary and at times even ambiguous information regarding his life and work. We do not know either the place or the year in which he was born; historiographical sources¹, coeval inscriptions on autograph drawings² and, above all, the notary’s deeds that he signed³, all point to his being a painter from Bologna, yet the absence of his name in the baptismal records of the Cathedral of San Pietro (the only baptistery in Bologna until 1918) suggests that he was born outside the city walls, in some unknown location within the vast diocese of Bologna. The first recorded mention of Giovanni Francesco Bezzi is dated 20 January 1549, when his name appears as a member of the Quattro Arti guild in Bologna, which grouped painters at the time with swordsmiths, scabbardmakers and saddlemakers. This date marks his official entrance as an independent painter, in other words as an artist with his own workshop, onto the city’s art scene⁴. According to the entry in the register, he was the son of a certain Bartolomeo, who was also a painter. The guild’s archives – the primary tool for recovering basic information regarding Bezzi’s biography – paint a picture of an artist already well established in the guild life of the Quattro Arti, in which he also held important institutional post in the 1550s and ‘60s. Having obtained a seat on the council – the guild’s board of directors, so to speak – he was elected on fully three occasions to the post of massaro or administrator, a role of the highest authority, which he held in 1555, in 1563 and in 1568. According to the statutes of the Quattro Arti, this was a post that no one under the age of thirty could hold. This gives us an indisputable terminus ante quem for his date of birth, which cannot have been any later than 1525⁵. Nosadella continued to play an important role in the Società dei Pittori e dei Bombasari until his death on 15 July 1571⁶, a date borne out by archival evidence: on 23 July of that year his seat on the council, vacant «par obitum Io. Fran.ci Betij», was assigned to Domenico Tibaldi⁷.

His constant, active participation in the city’s artistic life suggests that Bezzi spent most of his time in Bologna, which argues against the unlikely notion of any lengthy stays on his part in Rome or elsewhere. Yet his seeming professional success – admittedly confined to a strictly local environment – does not appear to have earned him any corresponding historiographical recognition. Vasari makes no mention of Nosadella’s name in his Lives of the Artists, and contrary to what has always been argued, there is no certainty that he collected his drawings in the Libro dei Disegni⁸. The only 16th century mention of him is in Pietro Lamo’s Graticola di Bologna a manuscript guide of Bologna written c. 1560, which describes him as the artist responsible for the paintings in the «goodly dwelling» of Palazzo Bolognetti alla Mercanzia⁹.

Aside from sporadic mentions in periegetic Bolognese literature (Cavazzoni, Masini), we owe the first and only attempt to reconstruct Nosadella’s artistic personality to Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who adds two short essays at the end of  of the Life of Pellegrino Tibaldi in his Felsina Pittrice (1678) on that artist’s Bolognese followers: Girolamo Mirola and Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, whom he describes as the artist’s «effective pupils»¹⁰. This expression, which is in itself ambiguous, has long been interpreted literally as meaning that the two painters were effectively apprenticed to Tibaldi’s workshop. More recent scholarship, on the other hand, has tended to rule out that possibility on the grounds that both these so-called pupils were, in fact, older (if only by a few years) than their alleged master, who was born in 1527 (while we know for certain that Girolamo Baroni, known as Mirola, was born in 1523). The historian’s words should perhaps be seen as an acknowledgement of the fact that the two painters subscribed with conviction and awareness (“effective”) to Tibaldi’s stylistic teachings, especially in the case of Nosadella who is afforded greater space in the Felsina Pittrice.

In the reconstruction of Malvasia, who follows the indications of the earlier sources, Bezzi emerges as a fresco painter («he painted mostly in fresco») specializing in the decoration of private homes – palaces in the city or suburban villas – owned by Bologna’s wealthier classes (the aristocracy proper and the senatorial élite appear not to have been among his patrons)¹¹. As far as we can tell today, nothing remains of the frescoes commissioned from Nosadella, or indeed of the painted cycles in the house of the Banzi family in Strada di Mezzo San Martino, now via Marsala, a commission recently rediscovered through certain documents, which probably disappeared when the house was renovated in the 18th century. The only surviving works, out of all those described in the sources, are two altarpieces, both still in situ and both attributable to the same patron, Girolamo Alamandini. One is an altarpiece depicting the Immaculate Conception with the Blessed Rainier and Saints, which Bezzi painted for the oratory of the Confraternita dei Battuti and which was placed on their altar in 1563¹², the other depicting the Circumcision, which he painted for the Alamandini family chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. In the latter case, Bezzi’s role is restricted to the design, because the altarpiece was painted by Prospero Fontana, who inherited the commission on Bezzi’s death and only completed the work in 1579¹³.

Malvasia’s assessment of Nosadella, based on a comparison with Tibaldi’s work, has invariably driven the painter’s rediscovery, begun by Hermann Voss in 1932¹⁴. Subsequent studies, which developed along attributive guidelines that were far from uniform, culminated in the work of Vittoria Romani (1988)¹⁵, who assigned to Nosadella a very consistent group of Holy Families reflecting Tibaldi’s influence, which now form the critical core of his catalogue. A certain number of exemplars of his secular painting began to surface in the 1990s, making up, in part, for the loss of the decorations in private palaces described by Malvasia. They include a Venus with Putti now in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Melun, which can probably be identified as the «Venus served by cupids» set into the «gilded ceiling» in the drawing room of Palazzo Bolognetti. Another painting in the group is a Thyestes and Aerope now in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, whose subject matter coincides with that in a painting noted by several French travelers conducting the Grand Tour (De Brosses and De Lalande) in Palazzo Zambeccari ¹⁶, formerly owned by a family of bankers named Lucchini, who turned to Bezzi, probably in the course of the second renovation campaign in their family palace in 1568, for the decoration of a fireplace and frieze fresco, so Malvasia tells us¹⁷.

In addition to the expansion of Bezzi’s catalogue beyond the original core group of Holy Families, research into Nosadella’s career has gradually begun to shed light, in recent years, on his artistic relations above and beyond his bond with Tibaldi, exploring his contacts with the local artistic culture of his day, the influence of Parmigianino and that of Primaticcio, as well as the interest that he began to show in his mature years in Raphael and, towards the end of his career, in Correggio. Study of Bezzi’s compositions has also revealed an extremely strong (and typically anticlassical) fascination with northern European art, which Nosadella discovered primarily through the prints of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Van Leyden. Northern European and Italian engravings were a crucial tool, given the way Nosadella worked, for the acquisition of motifs and designs for what was often not slavish but creative transfer into his own work.

Nosadella’s current catalogue, the product of a 20th century critical and attributive reconstruction, is still heavily overbalanced in favour of pictures intended for private devotion. Thus while, on the one hand, the painter’s current image differs from the image handed down to us by the sources, which describe him as primarily a fresco painter specialising in the decoration of private residences, modern attributions, on the other hand, are helping to consolidate the profile of an artist who pursued his career in predominantly domestic and bourgeois circles, remaining on the sidelines of the grand patronage circuits associated with the city’s public institutions and senatorial élite.