Giorgio Vasari

• 1. Introduction

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  Giorgio Vasari coined a word that historians still reach for five centuries later. Writing about Giotto's fresh way of painting, he called it a rinascita, a rebirth. In 1835, the French author Jules Michelet borrowed that idea for his Histoire de France and rendered it as Renaissance. The label stuck, and it now names an entire era. Yet Vasari was no detached scholar. He was born prematurely on the 30th of July 1511 in Arezzo, in Tuscany, and he spent his life as a painter and architect inside the orbit of the Medici court in Florence. He was admired in his own day and somewhat forgotten in later centuries. So how did a working Mannerist artist end up shaping how the West tells the story of its own art? Why did his book promote Florence above every rival city? And why do modern biographers still cite a man known for getting his facts wrong?

• 2. The First Art Historian

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  Le Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori first appeared in 1550, dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. With it, Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies, which is why he is often called the first art historian. The book is regarded as the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing. It is still cited in modern biographies of the Renaissance artists it covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Vasari did real archival research, hunting for exact dates the way later historians would. His accounts are considered most reliable for his contemporaries and the generation just before him. The Lives also carried a treatise on the technical methods of the arts, a novelty for its time. In 1568 Vasari rewrote and extended the work, adding woodcut portraits of artists, some of them only conjectural. He even closed the book with a short autobiography and tucked further family details into his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati. The same volumes that preserved so many reputations would also be blamed, in time, for distorting them.

• 3. A Florentine Thumb On The Scale

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  Venetian art is ignored systematically in the first edition of the Lives. The book shows a consistent and notorious bias toward Florentines, tending to credit them with every development in Renaissance art, including the invention of engraving. That slant was not accidental. Vasari was effectively the minister of culture to the Medici court, and the Lives promoted the idea of Florentine superiority in the visual arts. Between his two editions Vasari traveled to Venice, and the 1568 version finally gave more attention to Venetian work, at last including Titian. Even then it did not reach a neutral point of view. The historian Richard Goldthwaite notes that Vasari was among the earliest authors to use the word competition, or concorrenza, in its economic sense. He pressed the idea in his introduction to the life of Pietro Perugino, arguing that Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, kept hungry by fierce rivalry for commissions. Competition, he wrote, is one of the nourishments that maintain them. That theory of artistic hunger sat oddly beside the book's own unfair appetites.

• 4. Gossip And Error

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  Andrea del Castagno could not have killed Domenico Veneziano, yet Vasari wrote that he did. Andrea had died several years before Domenico. Errors like this run through the Lives, especially where Vasari covered artists from before his own birth. His pages are interspersed with amusing gossip, some plausible and some assumed to be invented. One famous tale describes the young Giotto painting a fly on a picture by Cimabue, so convincingly that the older master kept trying to brush it off. That story echoes anecdotes once told of the Greek painter Apelles. Vasari's grudges could be cruel. His life of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, whom he nicknamed Il Sodoma, appeared only in the second edition of 1568, after Bazzi had died. It condemned the artist as immoral, bestial, and vain, and dismissed his work as lazy and offensive. The verdict ignored the facts. Bazzi had been named a Cavalier of the Supreme Order of Christ by Pope Leo X and had won important commissions, among them work at the Villa Farnese.

• 5. The Working Artist

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  In 1529 Vasari went to Rome and studied the works of Raphael and other masters of the Roman High Renaissance. He was a Mannerist painter, more admired in his own lifetime than after it, and he stayed busy. In 1547 he finished the hall of the chancery in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes nicknamed the Sala dei Cento Giorni. The Medici employed him regularly in Florence and Rome, and he also worked in Naples, including on the Vasari Sacristy, as well as in Arezzo and elsewhere. From 1555 he and his assistants painted the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, his most important surviving paintings, and he helped organize the decoration of the Studiolo now reassembled there. He painted frescoes in the Sala Regia in Rome and trained followers such as Sebastiano Flori, Bartolomeo Carducci, and Mirabello Cavalori. His last great commission was a vast Last Judgement on the ceiling of the cupola of the Florence Cathedral, begun in 1572 with the Bolognese painter Lorenzo Sabatini. Left unfinished when Vasari died, it was completed by Federico Zuccari.

• 6. Building Florence

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  The loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi, by the Arno, opens the vista at the far end of a long, narrow courtyard. It is a singular piece of urban planning that works as a public piazza, and read as a short street it stands alone as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. Vasari was as successful an architect as he was a painter. He also designed the long passage now called the Vasari Corridor, linking the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti across the river. It runs beside the Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio, and threads around the outside of several buildings, on ground once home to the Mercado de Vecchio. He renovated the medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, stripping out their rood screens and lofts and remodeling the retro-choirs in the Mannerist taste of his day. In 1562 he raised the octagonal dome on the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of High Renaissance architecture. In Rome he worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammannati on Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia.

• 7. Honors And Devotion

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  Vasari married Niccolosa Bacci, from one of the richest and most prominent families of Arezzo, and amassed a considerable fortune during a life of high repute. The Pope made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. His native town elected him to its municipal council, and he rose to its supreme office of gonfaloniere. In 1547 he built a fine house in Arezzo and covered its walls and vaults with his own paintings; it now survives as a museum in his honor, the Casa Vasari, while his Florence residence is also preserved. In 1563 he helped found the Florentine Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and Michelangelo as its heads and thirty-six artists chosen as members. His devotion to Michelangelo, who had befriended him and shaped his painting style, outlasted the older man. Vasari designed the Tomb of Michelangelo in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, a monument finished in 1578, four years after Vasari himself died on the 27th of June 1574.