BEZZI, Giovanni Francesco - b. ~1530 Bologna, d. ~1571 ?

Italian painter and draftsman (also known as Nosadella). He was active only briefly, first documented in 1558 and dying in 1571 in Bologna. He appears to have travelled to Rome. He was a pupil of Pellegrino Tibaldi. Few of his paintings have certain attribution; among them are a Madonna and Child with Saints, painted for the Oratorio of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna, and a Circumcision (1571), painted for the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore and completed by Prospero Fontana.

Ignored by the artist-biographer Giorgio Vasari and his contemporaries, Nosadella’s oeuvre has been reassessed only recently by scholars, who have been challenged to distinguish his pictures from those of his master, Pellegrino Tibaldi.

The Holy Family with St John the Baptist

This picture displays several distinctive aspects of Mannerist vocabulary: formal complexity, awkward composition, eclectic style, and vibrant colouring. Unlike his master’s fluid, near academic reading of Michelangelo’s style, Giovan Francesco Bezzi (Nosadella) invested his figures with an exaggerated, almost grotesque monumentality and placed them within a relationship of congested intimacy.