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.