Giorgio Vasari

Italian historian, painter, and architect

• Born: July 30, 1511
• Birthplace: Arezzo, Republic of Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: June 27, 1574
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is an almost singular source on what is known of the lives and works of artists of the Renaissance. Vasari, who has been called the first art historian, was also a painter and architect.

Early Life

Giorgio Vasari (JYOHR-jyoh vah-ZAHR-ee), from ancient Arezzo, a hill town dating from Etruscan times and rich in mementos of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, was born into a family numbering several local artists among its antecedents. His father, Antonio, a tradesman, compensated for his own lack of creativity and financial success by maintaining close contact with men of consequence within the church and in artistic circles and was particularly proud of his kinship with Luca Signorelli, a major figure in mid-Renaissance art, who provided the young Vasari with his first lessons in drawing. Giorgio’s formal training, however, began under the guidance of a Frenchman resident in Arezzo, Guglielmo di Marsillac, now remembered as a major stained-glass artist. Yet it is likely that Giorgio learned much more from his daily exposure to local art treasures; he claimed, in fact, to have spent his early youth copying “all the good pictures to be found in the churches of Arezzo.”

At age fifteen, as a result of his father’s splendid contacts, Vasari was taken to Florence by Cardinal Silvio Passerini of Cortona, who brought him to the studios of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo. This initial contact with Michelangelo marked the beginning of a close relationship destined to last for forty years, and no single artist in Vasari’s vast knowledge of Renaissance creativity was more admired by him than Michelangelo: “I courted Michelangelo assiduously and consulted him about all my affairs, and he was good enough to show me great friendship.”

Cardinal Passerini also introduced him to members of the Medici family, in whose favor Vasari would remain for the duration of his career. At this particular time, however, such contact was of little consequence, for the Medicis were soon driven from the city, and Vasari, fearful for his own safety in the ensuing anti-Medici atmosphere, fled back to Arezzo, only to find his hometown ridden with a plague that had already taken his father’s life. His uncle, as guardian of the family, advised him not to go home and expose himself to such peril and instead arranged for him to live in nearby villages, where he made a meager living doing decorative work in small churches. The following year, the plague having run its course, he joined his family in Arezzo, once more relishing the opportunity to observe and copy local artworks and also finishing his first commission, a painting for the Church of San Piero.

Yet, when Florence again appeared safe for a Medici protégé, he returned, this time in the hope of making a reasonable living for his family, whose welfare was now his responsibility. He entered into an apprenticeship with a goldsmith. Once more his plans were disrupted by political upheaval, now in the form of the 1529 Siege of Florence. Vasari, never one to court danger, made his way to Pisa, where he abandoned his new craft and returned to painting, quickly making a name for himself as a reliable, competent, hardworking artist. His patrons were not Pisans but exiled Florentines, members of the distinguished Pitti and Guicciardini families.

Still not yet twenty years old and driven by the restlessness of youth, Vasari soon left Pisa, traveling a circuitous route via Modena and Bologna back to Arezzo, where he completed his first fresco, a representation of the four evangelists with God the Father and some life-size figures. From that time on, he was never lacking in distinguished patronage. Working on commissions for local rulers, princes of the Church, and the pope, he completed, always in record time, major fresco projects in Siena, Rome, Arezzo, and Florence. His works in this medium, most notably those in Rome’s Palazza della Cancelleria, the interior of Filippo Brunelleschi’s monumental dome in Florence’s cathedral, and the splendidly reconstructed rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio, were viewed as masterpieces in their day, and Vasari was richly rewarded. Yet despite their great contemporary appeal, posterity has dealt harshly with Vasari’s decorative works, viewing his efforts as superficial and flamboyant, devoid of intellectual clarity and spiritual depth.

Life’s Work

Although Vasari described himself as a painter and architect and clearly exerted a major portion of his time and energy on works in these fields, he made his principal contribution with Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , 1855-1885), a prodigious compendium of information on art and artists gradually accumulated throughout his mature years. Wherever he happened to be and he traveled widely and whatever the primary purpose of his journey, he always devoted a significant portion of his time to the observation of works by other artists, making sketches and taking notes and, whenever the opportunity was there, acquiring original sketches and drawings for his steadily mounting collection to which in his work he refers time and again, invariably with great pride.

It is quite possible that without the prodding of others, in particular his Rome patron Cardinal Farnese, the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects would have remained the writer’s private, unpublished notes on the arts of the Renaissance. The subject of compiling all his material into a published account, Vasari reports, was brought up at a dinner party in the home of the cardinal in 1546, when Paolo Giovio, already a renowned collector of portraits and a biographer but not an artist, expressed the wish for having available “a treatise discussing all illustrious artists from the time of Cimabue to the present.” Considering that the first manuscript was ready for the scribe in 1548, it stands to reason that Vasari must have had most of the material on hand by the time the subject of a book was broached, and that the two ensuing years must have been spent organizing the vast body of notes into a logical entity.

Not everything in the work represents the writer’s original thoughts. Vasari borrowed liberally from all available sources written observations by Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Raphael, and many others as a rule acknowledging his indebtedness. Such secondary aspects of the work, however, are far less important than Vasari’s own meticulous, often pedantic, descriptions of thousands of works of art in terms of structure, form, color, and purpose.

To facilitate the reader’s comprehension and establish a degree of unity in his flood of observations, he puts forth a set of criteria that in his opinion form the basis on which a work of art should be judged. First in this hierarchy of values is disegno, by which Vasari implies not only the total conceptual layout of a particular work but also the actual skill of drawing that must precede the finished product. With natura, true to the Renaissance spirit, he claims that excellence in art derives from careful observation and faithful re-creation of nature, or even, in the Neoplatonic consciousness so prevalent at the time, an improvement on nature. Decoro refers to the appropriateness, the decorum, or dignity, that should always be part of all visual creativity, stressing that the representation must befit the subject at hand. Iudizio, a less tangible term, is a criterion applied to the evaluation of an artist’s sense of sound judgment relative to his combining all the separate elements that go into the evolvement and completion of his work. Last in Vasari’s listing is maniera, an overall consideration referring either to a single artist’s unique style and approach or to the style, the manner, of an entire school, for example, the Sienese or the Florentine.

Vasari’s personal style of writing ranges from the matter-of-fact listing of data and descriptive details to a florid gushing of superlatives. In his discussion of the Italian painter Masaccio (1401-1428), he describes the Pisa Madonna in this straightforward way:

In the Carmelite church at Pisa, inside a chapel in the transept, there is a panel painting by Masaccio showing the Virgin and Child, and some little angels at her feet, who are playing instruments and one of whom is sounding a lute and inclining his ear very attentively to listen to the music he is making. Surrounding Our Lady are St. Peter, St. John the Baptist, St. Julian, St. Nicholas, all very vivacious and animated.

Entirely different and far more elevated are his comments on Leonardo da Vinci.

The excellent productions of this divine artist had so greatly increased and extended his fame that all men who delighted in the arts (nay, the whole city of Florence) were anxious that he should leave behind him some memorial of himself; and there was much discussion everywhere in respect to some great and important work to be executed by him, to the end that the commonwealth might have glory, and the city the ornament, imparted by the genius, grace, and judgment of Leonardo to all that he did.

While the weight and importance placed on Vasari’s descriptions and evaluations in subsequent times have shifted, his approach to artistic biography remained the unchallenged standard for the next three hundred years. Even in modern times any study of the artists of the Italian Renaissance tends to have Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects as its point of departure. It is to a considerable extent to his particular credit that neglect was not to be the destiny of the multitude of artists active on the Italian peninsula in those two hundred years he designated as the Renaissance.

Significance

In Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari devotes much space to a detailed description of his own numerous works carried out on commission in various parts of Italy, and to the lofty sociocultural standings of the many who sought to employ his talent and fame. It is therefore quite evident that he would have preferred to be remembered as a significant painter. Even so, he never succeeded in making a lasting impact in that field. Even his major commission, the challenging decorations in the most auspicious rooms in the Palazzo Vacchio, did not in retrospect come up to the standards set by his Florentine predecessors in the art of fresco painting, let alone those by artists much closer to his own time, Michelangelo and Raphael, whom he so deeply admired and whose works he so eloquently described.

In the final analysis, he failed by his own standards as well, for most of his frescoes are hopelessly congested, pompously rhetorical, wearisome to the eye, and clearly lacking the visual mellowness, the decorum, and the sound judgment set forth in his work as prerequisites for true artistic accomplishment.

None of this detracts in the least from the pioneering importance of his written work. Modern research carried out under circumstances far more favorable than those under which Vasari labored may have brought to light certain inaccuracies in his findings, and some of his evaluations have not withstood the test of time. More often than not, however, new research has simply resulted in a validation of his findings and observations. Furthermore, his minute descriptions of works of art not only constitute the basis on which the field of art history has been built but also provide the pattern for the process of attribution of works of art of the past, so important for the development of collections, private and public.

Bibliography

Burckhardt, Jacob. The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy. Edited and translated by Peter Humfrey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Swiss scholar Burckhardt’s nineteenth century works on the Italian Renaissance are considered classics in the field. Originally published in 1894 with two other essays, “The Collectors” and “The Portrait,” the original edition was entirely without illustrations, whereas in this first English edition the accompanying illustrations, in color and black and white, greatly enhance the discussion. While Burckhardt based his studies on personal probing of the subject, his principal documentation is rooted in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Decker, Heinrich. The Renaissance in Italy: Architecture, Sculpture, Frescoes. New York: Viking Press, 1969. A profusely illustrated volume containing meaningful references to Vasari. Although this and other statements tend to reinforce some of the negative criticism so often aimed at Vasari, Decker also stresses the importance of his contribution and actually judges his frescoes more favorably than do other writers.

Jacks, Philip, ed. Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Collection of essays on Vasari’s art, his criticism, his cultural milieu, and his representation of that milieu. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and MarcAntonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. An important study of the meaning of art and the figure of the artist in Renaissance Italy. Argues that the notion of the individual genius expressing his distinctive self through his images comes into being at almost the same time that new engraving technologies were invented that involved collaborative artistry and the dissemination of multiple copies of previously unique images. Looks at the cultural tension between these two novel models of art in the work of Vasari, Raphael, and Dürer with engraver Raimondi. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Robert, Carden W. The Life of Giorgio Vasari: A Study of the Later Renaissance in Italy. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. Drawing on Vasari’s own accounts and on other sources, the author discusses Vasari’s contribution as an artist and a writer in the perspective of the creative spirit of the waning years of the Renaissance and the early period of mannerism. Because Vasari’s own detailed description of his life and activities has made it less urgent to write on that subject, Robert’s work still remains the only comprehensive study available in English.

Rubin, Patricia Lee. Giorgio Vasari: Art and History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Detailed study of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects reveals both the concepts of art and artistry and the biographical man that stand behind the text. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Tarchi, Rossella, ed. The Rediscovery of “The Last Judgement”: The Restoration of the Frescoes in the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. Firenze, Italy: Cooperativa Firenze, 2000. Brief study of the discovery and restoration of a fresco by Vasari and Federico Zuccari. Includes illustrations and bibliographic references.

Wackernagel, Martin. The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market. Translated by Alison Luchs. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. Wackernagel’s book, a pioneering study originally published in 1938, examines the relationship between the arts and the immediate sociopolitical and economic conditions under which artists worked. Vasari’s documentations and judgment, as well as his relationship with patrons, receive good coverage.

Wittkower, Rudolf. Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. The last volume in the author’s collected essays contains extensive references to Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, always cited with great respect for the authority of the document. Particularly interesting is Wittkower’s discussion of the evolvement of Michelangelo’s dome of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, of which, Wittkower states, Vasari provided “detailed and reliable description,” whereas it was totally ignored by subsequent builders. Equally positive is Wittkower’s estimation of Vasari’s perspicacity relative to the development of Raphael’s talent.