Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

• 1. Introduction

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  Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects began not as a grand scholarly project but as a favor asked at a dinner party. The writer Paolo Giovio, at a gathering in the house of Cardinal Farnese, announced his desire to compose a treatise on contemporary artists. The Cardinal turned to his guest, a painter and architect named Giorgio Vasari, and asked him to supply Giovio with whatever information he could. What happened next changed the course of art history. Giovio stepped aside entirely and handed the project to Vasari. What Vasari produced was something no one had attempted before: a systematic encyclopedia of artistic biographies, running across two editions and, in its final form, three volumes. Critics have called it perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art. They have also called it the first important book on art history. How did one Italian painter, working in the sixteenth century, manage to define how the entire Western world would think about the Renaissance for hundreds of years? And how reliable was the picture he painted?

• 2. A Book Born from Bias

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  Vasari published his first edition in 1550, printed in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino and dedicated to Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. From the opening pages, the book carried a consistent and notorious preference for Florentine artists. Vasari attributed to them virtually every new development in Renaissance art, including the invention of engraving. Artists from Venice and the rest of Europe were, by his own pattern, systematically ignored. The first edition was two volumes; the second, published in 1568, expanded to three. Between those editions, Vasari visited Venice, and the revised text finally gave Titian his own biography. Even so, critics then and since have argued that the second edition never achieved a neutral point of view. The Venetian addition was an accommodation, not a conversion. John Symonds wrote in 1899 that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions, a charge Symonds leveled specifically at Vasari's life of Nicola Pisano. Vasari did not research archives for exact dates the way modern art historians do. His most dependable biographies are those of painters from his own generation and the one immediately before it.

• 3. Gossip, Fable, and Anecdote

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  Vasari's biographies are interspersed with gossip. Many of his anecdotes carry the ring of truth even when they are almost certainly invented. The tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue, so convincingly that the older master repeatedly tried to brush it away, is one of the most famous stories in art history. Vasari told it as though it were a genuine episode, but it belongs to a recognizable genre of tales. The same kind of story was told of the ancient Greek painter Apelles, centuries before Giotto was born. Vasari was not simply a chronicler; he was a storyteller who shaped his material to make a point about talent and rivalry. Modern criticism has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions, making use of archival materials that Vasari never consulted. The work is still regarded as a classic, and scholars still rely on it, but they do so knowing it must be supplemented by modern scientific research. Vasari himself appears within the pages. He included a forty-two-page sketch of his own biography at the end of the Vite, and added further details about himself and his family in the lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco de' Rossi.

• 4. A Model Copied Across Europe

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  Karel Van Mander published his Painting Book, Het Schilderboeck, in 1604, making him probably the first writer to follow Vasari's model directly. Van Mander's book did more than translate Vasari into Dutch; it also contained the first Dutch translation of Ovid, a list of Italian painters who had appeared after Vasari's time, and the first comprehensive list of biographies of painters from the Low Countries. He was quickly identified as the Vasari of his country, a label that would be applied to similar figures across Europe. Joachim von Sandrart, author of the Deutsche Akademie published in 1675, became the German Vasari. Antonio Palomino, whose account of the lives and works of the most eminent Spanish painters, sculptors, and architects appeared in 1724, was called the Spanish Vasari. In England, Aglionby's Painting Illustrated from 1685 drew heavily on the same source. In Florence itself, the biographies were revised and extended in the late seventeenth century by Filippo Baldinucci. The Vite had been translated wholly or partially into Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Each translation carried Vasari's framework into a new language, spreading both his insights and his blind spots.

• 5. The English Translators

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  Eliza Foster, publishing under the name Mrs. Jonathan Foster, produced the first English-language translation of the Lives, issued by Henry George Bohn in 1850-51 with careful and abundant annotations. Patricia Rubin, professor at New York University, has written that Foster's translation brought the Lives to a wide English-language readership for the first time, and that its value in doing so is proven by the fact that it remained in print and in demand through the nineteenth century. Foster's version was largely a paraphrase across six volumes. Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield followed with a four-volume translation in 1900. Gaston du C. de Vere produced a ten-volume translation published by Macmillan and Company and the Medici Society between 1912 and 1914. The most recent new English translation is the abridged version by Peter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, published in the Oxford World's Classics series in 1991. The modern scholarly Italian edition was edited by Rosanna Bettarini, with commentary by Paola Barocchi, published in eight volumes across eleven books between 1966 and 1997. In 1899, John Addington Symonds drew on the Vite as one of his basic sources for his seven books on the Renaissance in Italy, a measure of how central the text had become.