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| Fig. 1) Giorgio Vasari, Self-Portrait, Uffizi Gallery, Florence |
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Barbara Agosti
Giorgio Vasari. Luoghi e tempi delle Vite [Locations and Times of the Lives]
Milan, Officina Libraria, 2013
(Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro)
Other contributions on Giorgio Vasari in this blog
About Barbara Agosti’s publications see in
this blog: Barbara
Agosti, Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in 1500 Artistic Culture; Barbara
Agosti, Giorgio Vasari. Locations and Times of the Lives; Federico
Borromeo, Two Books on Sacred Painting, Edited by Barbara Agosti
"What
is presented here is an attempt, largely performed in a dialogue with the
students, to reorganize data and materials, in order to understand the genesis
of the book [note of the editor: Vasari's Vite
- Lives]" (p. 8). So writes the authoress in her preface.
I never
read anything more reductive (and excessively modest). The book by Ms Agosti is
a very valuable work for completeness and clarity, which reconstructs the
biography of Vasari in detail, particularly with regard to the years up to the publication
of the first edition of the Lives
(the Torrentiniana, 1550) [1]; starting
from already known theses, it gives them new life and develops some issues of
great importance with clarity, to better understand the genesis of the work. Of
course, it is not possible to account for all the details in a review. One can,
however, summarize the guidelines of the work, detecting at least three of them.
First, it may seem trite to say, but there is a
close relationship between the drafting of the Lives and the author's biography. The localities that Vasari visits over the years, the commissions he gets, the works of art he sees, the artistic
inspirations that influence him are naturally reflected in the Lives.
Second, the Lives’
drafting proceeded by accumulation of materials and their layering. The design
and preparation of the work include a time frame that, with different speeds, spans
probably from the late 1530s until 1550s (not to mention the eighteen
successive years, in which the conditions mature for the second edition, i.e.
the Giuntina of 1568). Sometimes more
and sometimes less easily, the different stages of preparation of the work (the
different 'layers') are even (and especially) perceptible within a single Life.
Third, some common myths with respect to the second
edition of the Lives are to be
challenged (or recalibrated): above all, that the initial design of Vasari was
to celebrate the Medici principality through the abstract opposition between
'design' and 'colour', the superiority of the former over the latter, and,
consequently, the supremacy of the Tuscan artistic school compared to those of
other Italian regions.
It is
always keeping these three pillars in mind that the notes that follow should be
read.
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| Fig. 2) Giorgio Vasari, Saint Gregory's Supper (1539), Bologna, National Picture Gallery |
[N.B.: On Giorgio Vasari see in this
blog also: Giovanni Mazzaferro, A
'new' portrait of Correggio in a specimen of Vasari’s Lives to be auctioned at
Sotheby's; The Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Edited by Enrico Mattioda, Part
One, Part
Two and Part
Three; Giovanni Mazzaferro, A
sample of the Giuntina edition of the Lives (1568) owned by Marcantonio Vasari
and kept in the Cavallini Sgarbi Foundation; Giovanni Mazzaferro, The
Annotated Specimens of Vasari's Lives: an Inventory, Part
One and Part
Two; Marco Ruffini, Sixteenth-Century
Paduan Annotations to the First Edition of Vasari's Vite (1550); Giovanni
Mazzaferro, A
new and unknown annotated copy of Vasari's 'Lives': the Anonymous of the
Marciana Library in Venice; Giovanni Mazzaferro, Hand-drawn Portraits in
Giorgio Vasari's Lives: New Discoveries, Part
One and Part
Two; Lucia Collavo, The
Sample of the Giunti Edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, as read and annotated
by Vincenzo Scamozzi; The
'Pocket Lives' of Giorgio Vasari: an Interview with Alessandro Nova, General
Editor of the Series; Giovanni Mazzaferro, Vasari
and the 'Homeric Question': conflicting interpretations of the Lives in the
light of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci; Barbara Agosti, Giorgio
Vasari. Locations
and times of the Lives]
First of
all, it is worth using the words of the authoress, to remember what the
publication of the Lives meant,
historically, for art history.
"Before
the publication of the first edition of Vasari's Lives at the printing house of the Duke of Florence - Lorenzo
Torrentino - in 1550, artists and their works had been object of discussion by
a long, varied and sometimes illustrious tradition of literature. Never until
then, however, art works, their language and the personalities of their
authors had been all framed in the dimensions of a coherent historical
narrative. Vasari articulates it, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century,
not on the basis of biographic data of the selected artists, but according to the
features and developments of their style: "I will endeavour to notice as
much as possible the order of their manners, more than of the time." And never
before the ambition had appeared - among the genres of art source literature – not
to cover a context that was limited to one municipal or however local area, but
an open environment, including as far as possible, to the whole of Italy. What
is very impressive in the Torrentiniana
version, in fact, is not all what is missing, but in fact everything it is
there. The historiographical work of Vasari, therefore, marks a radical break,
and properly founds the modern art history, which today we understand and
practice "(p. 8).
Vasari captured
elements of information basically from three different channels: written
sources, dialogues with the personalities he was acquainted with, and the direct
eye feedback. In this way, especially in the comparison between written sources
and ocular inspection, Agosti believes to identify the main benefit (and there
were many others) of the friendship between Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini, the great
Florentine philologist, who was only four years younger of the artist from
Arezzo,
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| Fig. 3) Giorgio Vasari, The deposition (1539-1540), Church of the Monastery of Camaldoli (Arezzo) Source: http://it.wahooart.com |
The ocular inspection and the friendships
It is just
obvious that the ocular inspection is exercised in coincidence of travelling
undertaken by Vasari. It was, in most cases, business travelling, i.e.
transfers due to job opportunities and commissions. Here another common place is
to be dispelled, probably fuelled by Vasari himself in his Autobiography inserted into the Giuntina,
i.e. in the second edition: that of a happily courtier artist, inseparably linked
to the Medici dynasty, and easily established at the centre of the cultural
scene of the time. Nothing like that. It is true that Vasari began his career
in Rome in 1532, in the service of Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici; it is equally
true that in the middle of the same year he was already in Florence, at the
disposal of Ippolito’s cousin, i.e. Alessandro de' Medici; but it is equally
undeniable that Giorgio left the city of Florence in early 1537, after the
assassination of Alessandro. And that Alexander's successor, i.e. Cosimo I,
looked at him with suspicion; he had little confidence in him, and no sympathy
for him had Cosimo’s powerful secretary as well, Pierfrancesco Riccio. From
1537 to 1553, Vasari is therefore substantially far from Florence and outside
of the circuit of Medici patronage. For us (and for the birth of the Lives) a great fortune.
To be
really important during these sixteen years for Giorgio (who left Florence,
deeply affected by the violent death of Alexander and discouraged about the
court system) is his network of friendships. The friendships, first of all,
allow him to find commissions and then to pursue an artistic career. From this
point of view, the reference figures are those of Giovanni Lappoli said Pollastra,
canon of Arezzo and educator of Giorgio in his youth, and Don Miniato Pitti, an
Olivetan abbot, who allowed him thanks to an active promotional campaign to
find room in the commissions deliberated by religious orders. A quick check is
sufficient to see that Vasari is repeatedly in Camaldoli between 1537 and 1540
and in Ravenna in 1548, working for the Camaldolese order; at San Michele in
Bosco in Bologna between 1539 and 1540, in Naples in 1544, in Rimini at the
service of Olivetans in 1547.
Some of Vasari’s
friendships are destined to be in some way 'obscured' within the Autobiography of
the artist; it is the case, for example, of Pietro Aretino, whose acquaintance dates
back to the youth and, for example, led him to move to Venice (December 1541 -
summer 1542) where the field had been prepared just by the rave lauds about him
that Aretino himself had made of Vasari. The coexistence between the two must
not have been very easy, if even years later one can still detect the traces of
disagreements between the two, dating back to just those months. But it is very
likely that his 'removal' in the Autobiography is due mostly to the image of
Aretino who, in the age of Counterreformation, was put in strong question
because of his licentiousness.
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| Fig. 4) Giorgio Vasari, Allegory of Patience, Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia Source: http://it.wahooart.com |
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| Fig. 5) Giorgio Vasari, Allegory of Justice, Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia (1542) Source: http://it.wahooart.com |
More
acquaintances are derived as from the very first stay in Rome, in the service
of Ippolito de' Medici in 1532. One cannot fail to recall here, albeit briefly,
personalities like Annibal Caro and Paolo Giovio, who contributed actively to
the preparation of the work. If in the case of Caro it was certainly a role as reviser,
in the one of Giovio it cannot be limited to this aspect only. First of all, is
to Giovio himself that Vasari attributes, in his own Autobiography, the idea of
writing a treatise on the lives of the artists. We are already in 1546 (p. 73).
It is known that it is a false date: the drafting of the Lives had begun a long time before, and this is just a subterfuge
to connect his work to that of the author of the Elogia as well as collector of the Museum [2]; nevertheless, according to Agosti, it is Giovio (who
had a not-trivial artistic culture) who provides information to Vasari about
the Lombard artists appearing in the third part of his work (the one dedicated
to the 'modern manner') [3]; "the one by Giovio is a historical
perspective that really matters a lot for the way in which Vasari builds the link
between the second and the third age in his Lives,
relegating the shy classicism of Perugino in the second one and hinging the
start of the third one around the personality of Leonardo, as a new founder" (p.17). And most likely, it is Giovio himself (a staunch supporter of the Medici)
to transform (not being alone) the Vasari's Lives
of the Torrentiniana edition into a Tuscan-based work, encouraging Vasari to
dedicate it to the Duke Cosimo.
Then there
are (we shall see how important they are) all the acquaintances at the
Accademia Fiorentina, from Borghini (whom we have already mentioned), to Cosimo
Bartoli, Pierfrancesco Giambullari and Carlo Lenzoni.
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| Fig. 6) Giorgio Vasari e aiuti. Pope Pail III supervising the construction of St. Peter (1546). Rome, Chancellery Palace |
Vasari’s Lives:
a stratified work
How had the
idea of the Lives been born? Vasari
gives us an official version, which we have already mentioned (i.e. in Rome in
1546, during a convivial meeting at the Palazzo Farnese with Paolo Giovio and
other scholars). Then, he mentions however a number of 'memoirs' that he had
collected from an early age, for passion and interest in the memories of the
artists. In fact, already in a letter of 1537 (see p. 25), Pietro Aretino
defines Vasari as "historian, poet, philosopher, and painter": the
status of 'historian' will appear repeatedly in successive testimonies from
other sources. A sign that the one of the Lives, in a nutshell, was an idea
that Vasari considered for several years (and about which he must have spoken
with intimate friends), starting with an analysis of the sources, but also from
the direct examination. No wonder, then, if Ms Agosti considers that the earliest
drawn Lives refer to artists from Arezzo; and above all that the drafting of the
individual medallions reflects chronologically Vasari’s trips, with later
additions that stratify the composition of the text. "It should be noted, in
fact, that the Lives of 1550 are on
the one hand a book grown by way of a slow and long process, and on the other
hand a book finalised at a breakneck speed, with changes and additions that
went on until there was a material possibility, and even with mistakes and
inaccuracies that remained in the text anyway, and that from there even migrated
to the Giuntina" (p. 29). The
examples in this respect are always accurate: "I believe that the
biography of Raphael was grounded right on the basis of what he saw, the impressions
and notes related to his stay in Rome in 1538, then subjected to a progressive
reworking ... Trying to get into the crux of Vasari’s writing, we understand
that a first stage of Raphael’s life must have existed in which, consistently, Vasari
passed from the praise of the portrait of Leo X and his courtiers in the Attila [note of the translator: The
Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila by Raffaello] to the praise of the portrait
of the Pope with the Medici cardinals. I think that it was at this point [...] that
Vasari, after the travel season in the early Forties, has "injected"
the memory of most of the other works of Raphael he had viewed around Italy" (p. 29). But the same kind of consideration could be done for Leonardo’s
Life, in which the description of the Last Supper seems so vivid to suppose
that there has been an ocular inspection of the work by the author, during a (not
completely sure, but now widely supposed) trip to Milan in 1548. That
description would therefore be subsequent to the drafting of the first version
of the biography, which cites Ottaviano de' Medici as living. He had passed
away in 1546 [4]. The problem of distinguishing the different stages of
preparation, in the context of individual biographical medallions, becomes the
real challenge of the critic of Vasari. It is an endless work. The publication
of this volume, for example, was accompanied in substance from that of the
proceedings of a conference organized in 2012 by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, specially dedicated to the
analysis of the Lives in the Torrentiniana
version [5]. It is understood, however, that the authoress believes (and she
argues with arguments that I cannot recall here for the sake of brevity) that
the hard core of the Lives has been
drawn up in Rome, between autumn 1542 and summer of 1544 (see pp. 57 ff.).
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| Fig. 7) Giorgio Vasari e aiuti, Remuneration of Goodness (1546), Rome, Chancellery Palace |
The torrentiniane
Lives and the false Tuscany-centric myth
An episode
would be enough to explain that, up to the very last, the Torrentiniane Lives remained disconnected from the exaltation of
the primacy of the Medici and the Tuscan art as hierarchically superior to that
of other Italian regions. In November of 1549, Pope Paul III died; in February
of the following year, Giovanni Maria del Monte (alias Julius III), former protector
of Vasari in previous years, was elected pope. Vasari and Borghini suspended the
printing of the work and thought, for a few days, to engineer a double
dedication: one to Cosimo de' Medici for the first two ‘ages’, and another one to
Julius III for the third ‘age’ (the most important one, that of the 'modern
manner') [6]. Moreover, the decision to dedicate the Lives to Cosimo was chronologically recent, dating back, in fact, only
to 1549. While it is true that this work was one of many tools used by Vasari to
convince Cosimo to recall him to Florence, and to include him into the circle
of those producing art for him (such inclusion will materialise only in 1553),
it is not accurate that the Torrentiniana
is written in that courtier spirit that it is precisely typical of the Giuntina, published when the artist
Arezzo had already become one of the resonators of the splendour of the Grand
Duchy.
There is,
from this point of view, a close relationship between the artistic work of
Vasari and what is written in the Lives.
On several occasions Ms Agosti points out that the real world with which the
painter is confronted in his paintings is that of the various 'manners' that
are derived from the work of Raphael, and not from that of Michelangelo. The
exaltation of Michelangelo is a really late development. And - despite what
Vasari writes in his Autobiography - the friendship with Michelangelo becomes firm
and consolidated only after the publication of the first edition of the Lives. We follow the authoress in her
reasoning: "The travelling season led to the increase and the broadening
of the range of knowledge. In addition, the critical organisation of the work [note
of the editor: the Lives] was also enriched,
in particular in as much as it concerned the definition and periodization of
the "third age", i.e. the modern manner. This was still a recent development
and therefore required a much more authoritative assessment both from the
author as well as from those who would read him. Leonardo is established as the
boundary, compared to the dryness and the archaisms of the second age; he is
given the same position of absolute prominence which he had already attributed by
Giovio. It is precisely by way of a comparison between these different horizons
that the powerfully geographical articulation arises, which opens the third
part of the Lives. It also depends on
the geographic dissemination of Vinci’s mastery: with Giorgione in Venice, who
will be superseded by Titian; with Correggio in Lombardy, who will be
superseded by Parmigianino; by Piero di Cosimo in Florence, who will be superseded
by Andrea del Sarto. The preparation work of the Torrentiniana, which had started from the beginning of the forties,
has therefore its roots in earlier experiences of the author. In full coherence
with the cultural coordinates of Vasari as a painter, the critical core of his
historical project is intensely based on Raphael." (p. 59). This does not
mean of course that Tuscany is neglected, as it is perfectly logical, since it was
the environment in which Vasari had grown and which he knew best. But there is
no claim of a 'geographical' supremacy. Of course, within the Lives, one can also find hostile
appreciations, for example in respect of the Neapolitan or Bolognese painting (see
page 65), but these passages reveal an aversion most likely due to personal
experiences happened in the course of their stay. Nothing more. The examples
given by the authoress to support her thesis are manifold: we will mention only
one, in regard to the answer given (in 1547) by Vasari to Benedetto Varchi as part
of the famous comparison between painting and sculpture, "How evanescent, to
the height of Varchi’s response, was any Florence-centric critical intention in
Vasari’s head, says the fact that here the only teacher to be summoned to claim
the vivid superiority of the art of painting over the rival art is Titian"
(p. 75).
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| Fig. 8) Giorgio Vasari, Adoration of the Magi, Rimini, Church of St. Fortunato |
It is so
that Ms Agosti can come to the conclusion: "If we keep in mind that even
in a "late" Life as it is the one of Sebastiano del Piombo "the ambiance [...]
conducive to the painters and to all the clever people" was that of Rome, and
not of Florence, the Florence-centrism of the Torrentiniana is rather a kind of final outcome, jointly produced on
the one hand by the fact that the Life of Michelangelo is introduced at the end
of the Lives, and on the other hand by the theoretical framing in which the
work was enclosed, however only at the very end. This framing consists of: at
the beginning, the dedication to Cosimo formulated with the wise advice of
Paolo Giovio (but not yet delivered to the printers in January 1550), [...] and
the Introduction explicitly focused on the metaphysics of the design, developed
in the Lezzione [n.d.t. Lesson] by Varchi
[7], and at the end the Conclusion
with the statements on the method, drafted with the assistance of Vincenzo
Borghini. Later on, once it was established that the book would be dedicated to
Cosimo and published by Torrentino, his long gestation and preparation process was
fulfilled ... with a massive intervention by helping friends auditors related
to the Florentine Academy ... who from 1548 on (while Vasari runs behind so
many other commitments), increasingly take over the pursuit of the editorial project.
It is at this fairly late time that the project of the art history book (developed
at length by Giorgio Vasari, and gradually put in place with the assistance
especially by Giovio, Annibal Caro, Borghini) will face a profound turning in
its intentions. It is like if it had been his scholars and friend who understood
before and better than him that the Lives
were the better card to play to obtain to be called in Florence" (pp.
77-78).
The
question remains of the choice to place the biography of Michelangelo, the only
living artist included in the work, at the end of this edition,
and as almost natural exit of the development of the arts. A choice by Giorgio?
An advice by his friends? According to internal evidence - Agosti says - the
biography would appear to have been written quite late, around 1547, and thus it
might have revolutionised a design with a different origin: that more
geographically distributed design, in search of Raphael’s 'manners' of which we
spoke above. On this issue a question mark remains. But, to be honest, after I
finished reading this book, I got a clear perception of both how much has already been
written on Vasari on the one hand, and how much remains to be written on the other
hand, in search of a truth that seems fascinating but that, perhaps, we will
never know.
NOTES
[1]
Vasari's Lives were published in two
editions: the Torrentiniana (1550)
and the Giuntina (1568). For their
consultation please refer to the book edited by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna
Bettarini (Sansoni first and S.P.E.S. later on, from 1966 to 1997)
[3] This topic has been widely discussed by the same authoress
in Paolo Giovio, Uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento (Paolo
Giovio: A Lombard historian in the artistic culture of the sixteenth century),
Leo S. Olschlki, 2008.
[4] On this,
see in this blog Giovanni Mazzaferro, “Vasari and the 'Homeric Question': conflicting interpretations of the Lives in the light of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci”.
[5] Giorgio Vasari e
il cantiere delle Vite del 1550 (Giorgio Vasari and the construction of the
Lives in 1550), edited by Barbara
Agosti, Silvia Ginzburg, Alessandro Nova, Venice, Marsilio, 2013.
[6] See Carlo Maria Simonetti, La vita delle «Vite» vasariane. Profilo storico di due edizioni (The life of Vasari’s
"Lives". Historical profile of two editions), Florence, Leo S.
Olschki, 2005.
[7] Benedetto Varchi, Lezzione della maggioranza delle arti (Lesson on the majority of arts) in Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (Writings of art of the sixteenth century), Tomo I, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1971-1977.
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