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Giorgio Vasari and his Many Lives
Rebecca Keary, 02 October 2003 - [ E-mail a Friend ]
As such a student I encountered Vasari only briefly (being more interested in modern architecture), but I still knew that no corner of the Renaissance could ever be free of him. His name has been hanging around in the murky shadows of my mind ever since. When, recently, our firm bought the library of Peter Murray, an art historian whose particular interest was Vasari, I found myself taking a closer look.
What has astonished me is the number of existing editions of his master-work, The Lives of the most eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Particularly over the last century, there has been a feverish outbreak of new editions critical editions, translations and re-translations, as well as 'books about'. It begs the question, is there really an audience for this plethora of publications on what is a lengthy and, occasionally, laborious book about dead painters?
Giorgio Vasari could be credited as the father of art history. Born in 1511, he came from a family of potters and, during his early years in his Tuscan home-town of Arezzo, he worked as a saddle painter. Vasari soon showed a talent for drawing and was sent to Florence to study with Andrea del Sarto and others; and met, and was possibly taught by, Michelangelo. Vasari worked for the Medici family in Florence and the Farnese family in Rome, painting frescoes and designing buildings (markedly better at the latter than the former). Around 1544 there was a now famous dinner party, during which, according to Vasari himself, he was asked by Cardinal Farnese to write a chronological catalogue of contemporary and early Renaissance artists and their works. Around six years later, in 1550, the first edition of Vasari's Lives... appeared, containing 142 biographies of painters, sculptors and architects; the exact number of copies printed is unknown. It was written in Italian, although most books written for the humanist circles in Florence and Rome at the time would have been in Latin. Vasari was slightly cavalier with respect to dates and occasionally other facts, but his use of down-to-earth prose, stories, and anecdotes produced vivid and, probably, fairly accurate portraits of these mostly long-dead painters
The first of its kind, this biographical dictionary of artists was not strictly chronological, but rather divided the artists into three 'periods of achievement'. Vasari saw the ancestry of art stretch back to Roman times, and viewed the period up to the Middle Ages as a time of decline. The Lives... begins with Cimabue, born in the mid-thirteenth century, but things began to get really exciting, according to Vasari, at the prefer very beginnings of the Renaissance, particularly with Giotto, when artists (mainly Tuscan) began, once again, to take notice of proportion, perspective, naturalistic rendering, and all the other ingredients of classical art. At the Medici court in Florence and later in Rome, Vasari saw the rebirth of the classical spirit in art and wrote his part-biography, part-history, as a triumphant chronicle of this event. It culminated, in the first edition of the Lives..., with the life and career of Michelangelo, the only artist profiled there who was still alive in 1550, representing the best in contemporary Tuscan art.
Little did Vasari know that, by dividing the arts into periods and styles, he was setting a precedent for the discipline of art history that persists today. Nor could he know how much precious information his account still gives the art researcher. The Lives... gives us knowledge not only about the character of the artists, but also about their financial position, their patrons, their respective commissions, their workshops and practices, almost everything, in fact, apart from what they wore in bed. In Vasari's time, this type of reference book in the field of art history was unknown, and Vasari's own sources were unreliable and piecemeal. The Lives... was, in essence, the first integral art history text.
A second, much expanded, edition appeared in 1568 to immediate acclaim, eclipsing the first despite its length; more than half a million words. That the Lives…was as appreciated then as now is clear from the approbation Vasari received from contemporaries and social superiors. Fellow Tuscans liked the book for being written in the vernacular, dominated by Tuscan artists, and for its historical viewpoint, which suggested that art was reaching its apex in the hands of modern artists. Vasari even, although not unreservedly, won the approval of Michelangelo, who wrote him a sonnet. George Bull a Vasari biographer thought that, after the publication of the second edition, " spent the rest of his life in a glow of self-satisfaction and public recognition". In 1571 he received a knighthood from a grateful Pope and at his death, three years later, he left this world a respected artist and architect, and the founder of art history.
In the years that followed there were the inevitable followers and imitators, but in the end it was Vasari's ghost that endured. In 1760, after a considerable break, a new edition appeared. Then, in 1811 another new edition appeared, and the first English translation, by a Mrs. Foster, was published in 1846. This new rush of interest prompted by the new tendency to romanticise the artist as hero a was countered in the second half of the century with a more rigorous critical approach, as exemplified by Milanesi's landmark critical edition. The Lives... had become a classic and the production of sumptuous editions increased, including Gaston de Vere's translation, published in 1912 by the Medici Society and printed at the Chiswick Press.
In 1908, a single event reinvented Vasari entirely. An Italian researcher 'discovered' a stack of Vasari's personal documents in the archive of the Rasponi-Spinelli family (distantly related to Vasari). They included correspondence, Vasari's working diary, and his working notes. Never before had historians held such a wealth of information about a single Renaissance artist. This, together with Vasari's autobiography, tacked modestly onto the end of the second edition of the Lives..., enabled historians to surmise something about almost every aspect of his life; as T.S. Boase (a fairly recent biographer of Vasari) remarks, he is "immensely knowable".
The Italians were understandably proud of Vasari, and of the discovery of the archive. But not long after the news got out, the discovery was snatched from under their noses. An international scandal erupted when Dr. Karl Frey, a professor of art history from Berlin, bought the exclusive publishing rights from the Rasponi-Spinelli family and effectively moved the archive to Germany. The amount involved was considerable. More shocking was that Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, put up half of the money; the rest, reputedly, donated by various German businessmen. The Germans had claimed Vasari as their own.
Frey took on the task of translating the archive into German, but died, his magnum opus unfinished, in 1917. Consequently the copyright agreement also expired and the publishing rights reverted back to the Rasponi-Spinelli family, who gave the archive to the city of Arezzo (where Vasari's house still stands) on permanent loan. In 1930, Frey's son published a second volume of Vasari's correspondence independently then teamed up with Alessandro del Vita, the curator of the archive at Arezzo, to publish Italian editions of the correspondence. Due to the political situation, it took some time for this to be accomplished; and few copies could be printed and disseminated when it was. Nonetheless the discovery revived interest in Vasari and after the war there was something of a renaissance in Vasari scholarship. In 1950, the fourth centenary of the publication of Vasari's first edition provided a timely excuse for Vasari scholars to convene in Florence and investigate new research topics. A river of critical, analytical, and biographical books followed.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the renewed interest in Vasari and art history in general, and the wealth of new information available, kicked off a new series of critical, annotated editions and translations of the Lives.... Monster productions such as Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini's nine-volume critical edition of 1966-87 (of which three volumes are commentary) satisfy the most academically curious, while abridged paperback editions abound for enlightened laypeople and lazy art history students. This is not including the vast and growing numbers of books about the Lives... and Vasari's historical context. Five centuries after Vasari's lifetime, his ghost shows no signs of fading away, but, surprisingly, the man himself has been a little neglected in comparison with his book, particularly in the English language. This is remarkable, as it was Vasari's personality, in the end, that made The Lives... the success that it is, and enabled his ghost to haunt art history students across the world to this day.