How to avoid bankers in your nativity scene

In the vast Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore between Siena and Rome, the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Benedict by Giovanni Anionio Bazzi includes a charming self-portrait of the artist standing with a couple of pets at his feet, for all the world a 16th-century Italian Dorothy with a brace of Totos. (A detail of the painting is reproduced overleaf.)

Bazzi did not earn his popular soubriquet of ‘Sodoma’ for nothing — though Vasari is not always reliable — but if his life was the scandalously licentious and dishonourable thing that Vasari would have us believe, then this only places him in the mainstream of the world described in Alexander Lee’s fascinating new book. ‘It was a period of sex, scandal and suffering,’ Lee writes. ‘Its cities were filled with depravity and inequality, its streets thronged with prostitutes and perverted priests, and its houses played home to seduction, sickness, shady backroom deals and conspiracies of every variety.’

If there is a problem with The Ugly Renaissance, a book full of detail and close readings of some of the greatest paintings of the period, it is that Lee asks us to be surprised by something that is unlikely to surprise many of his readers. He is right, of course, when he says that the traditional picture of Renaissance Italy is one of light and beauty, but from Elizabethan anti-Catholic propaganda and 16th-century satirical protestant woodcuts down to Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Jeremy Irons in The Borgias, there has always been a popular view of papal Rome or Medici Florence as a world of violence, corruption and every conceivable — and inconceivable — filth.

Does anyone really look at the Raphael portrait of Leo X and not see a study in ruthless dynastic ambition? Is it possible to view the great Uccello funerary monument to Sir John Hawkwood in Florence’s Duomo and not recall the violence and brutality of early Renaissance Italy? It is hard to believe that anyone since E.M.