Giovanni Mazzaferro, Vasari and the 'Homeric Question': conflicting interpretations of the 'Lives' in the light of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

Click here for Italian version

Giovanni Mazzaferro 

Vasari and the 'Homeric Question': 

conflicting interpretations of the Lives 

in the light of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci

Fig. 1) Frontcover of Vasari's Lives (Giuntina edition 1568)

Anyone who has made classical studies will remember well the so-called 'Homeric Question', or the long-standing debate on the real existence of Homer and on whether he was really the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, or whether at least one of the two poems was a collective work settled down over the years through sedimentation thanks to various artists. 

It should be said however that in the case of Vasari and his Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, as from Cimabue until our times) things are definitely better: we all know that Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a real person. On everything else, scholars do not agree at all. 

More seriously, we are accustomed to consider the Vite (hereafter: Lives) as the work of Vasari [1]. Of course we know that, in this monumental undertaking, Vasari benefited from associates, both for the retrieval of information as well as the revision and the fine-tuning of the text. And we also know who his associates were. The names are those of Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Cosimo Bartoli, Carlo Lenzoni, Vincenzo Borghini, and Paolo Giovio. However, their intervention was never considered so invasive to question the substantial paternity of Giorgio Vasari in relation to the whole work. 

If this is the conventional wisdom, however, there is (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), a stream of scholars with a radically different view: according to those supporting it, Vasari was the author of not more than about 40% of the work (to the most); everything else would have been written by friends and external collaborators. The Lives, in short, would be a collective (or 'multiple') work in which, by choice, only the writer from Arezzo emerges as the author. 

It would be wrong to underestimate this stream of literature, however "heretical" it might appear. Its main proponent is Charles Hope. The name, perhaps, cannot say much to the layman, but he is a famous art historian, director of the Warburg Institute from 2001 to 2010 and author of numerous monographs of success. Hope is, in short, an essential name in the English-speaking world of art criticism. 

By coincidence, I happened to read these days two essays devoted to Vasari’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Placed one on the one side and the second on the other side of the fence of this polemic, they first of all evidence how one can draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same text, that of the life of Leonardo in the Torrentino edition. Or, more generally, that there are no "neutral" texts, least of all in art history. The interpretation of each word is the result of the general approach with which one approaches the text. This article aims to compare the two texts: the first one, of course, by Charles Hope, and the second one by Roberta Battaglia. 

Charles Hope, The Biography of Leonardo in Vasari's Lives [2] 

The thesis of Hope is very simple. It is not materially conceivable that Vasari may be the sole author of the Lives. Let us start with the facts. In his autobiography (present only in the Giunti edition of 1568) Vasari writes that the idea of ​​writing the Lives matured over the course of a convivial evening held in Rome in Palazzo Farnese. To incite him to this endeavour were the words of various writers present that evening, and in particular it was Paolo Giovio, who, in principle, proposed him to replicate the model he had already applied with the literates in his Elogia (Praises): i.e. writing biographical medallions dedicated to the most famous artists (provided they would have already deceased at the time of publication) [3]. We are (more or less) in the fall of 1546. Little more than one year after, the Lives are already practically finished and Vasari can leave for artistic commitments to Rimini. In a year or so, Vasari would have drafted a work of 300,000 words, while honouring at least six painting commissions, including very large ones. Impossible. If this was the timetable, it is just obvious that Vasari must have asked friends or people he trusted to assist him in the work, "procuring" in fact to a third party most of the biographies. The proof of this lies in the work itself: “If one reads the book straight through from cover to cover, which few people have occasion to do, it becomes very clear that it cannot all have been written by one man. Not only are the individual lives in different styles, with different syntax, spelling and vocabulary, but in many cases they appear to be written by authors with different priorities and different knowledge. In some lives, for example, there are dates of historical events and occasionally even of specific works of art, but in most of them nothing of this kind appears. In some lives, such as that of Domenico Ghirlandaio, works or art are comprehensively described, with every subject specified in detail. By contrast, whoever wrote the life of Giotto did not bother to visit Santa Croce, to see what he had actually painted there” (pp. 13-14) [4]. And again: “The idea that the book had a single author makes it difficult to explain… why for example Raphael’s Galatea is mentioned in the lives of Baldassarre Peruzzi and Sebastiano del Piombo, but not in that of Raphael himself, or to account for the fact that the famous competition between Raphael and Sebastiano, involving the Transfiguration and the Raising of Lazarus, is only mentioned in the life of Sebastiano. It is also surprising that the name of Michelangelo is spelled in seven different ways in the book, and Buonarroti in six different ways, but within each life or other section in which he is mentioned the spelling is almost always consistent” (p. 14). 

Of course there are parts of the Lives that are directly attributable to the autography of Vasari. This is the long description of the frescoes in Rimini, mistakenly attributed to Giotto, or the biography of Giorgio’s grandfather, Lazzaro Vasari. Unfortunately, exactly these passages reveal the lack of any major literary skills of the author; their, basically sloppy, style is reflected in the one with which are written the shortest biographies in the work. Vasari, in short, seems to have no great literary qualities [5]. 

Things, in short, would have gone like this, according to Hope: judging by the style, Vasari would have commissioned to third parties the preparation of the fifteen most extensive biographical medallions and about thirty other Lives; the remaining (shorter) 86 Lives would have been written by him. Overall, therefore, it must be assumed that only 40% of the Lives were written by Vasari; the remainder by Borghini, Giambullari, Bartoli and so forth, who have been cited at the beginning.

Vasari’s sources according to the thesis by Hope 

The problem of the sources should not be overlooked. According to Hope, Vasari had already written some notes on the artistic heritage of the cities he had visited. These notes, however, had basically a private purpose; they served as a reminder. At the time, moreover, the only guides available on the market were the memorials by Francesco Albertini on Rome and Florence. [6] It is therefore normal that a traveller interested in art would draft a list of works for educational purposes only commemorative, often disregarding the specific subjects or locations. From these untidy notes, Vasari would have drawn for the preparation of the Lives; he would then have made ​​use of some of the existing manuscripts at the time, which essentially replicated the same pattern of lists of works; the Libro di Antonio Billi, (Antonio Billi's Book), for example [7]. Hope does not think, however, that Vasari has drawn from the so-called Anonymous Magliabechiano, a manuscript that derives from and expands the Libro di Antonio Billi [8]. The Anonymous contains material not cited by Billi; part of this material is present in the Lives and part is not. What is the solution of the problem? Hope restores a thesis of the early twentieth century, i.e. that in fact a third manuscript existed, which is now lost (called Manuscript K). That manuscript would reflect an intermediate state and it was the true source of Vasari. This text - let us say it immediately - takes a little the characteristics of the Higgs boson; everything that you cannot explain well is assumed to be present in the Manuscript K, obviously in a very presumptive manner. These would be the sources at the disposal of Vasari and the other authors of the Lives; on the top of it, there would be the whole part concerning anecdotic evidence, which permeates the entire work and has enjoyed until now undisputed luck. Here Hope is even stronger: it is simply pure invention. 

The Torrentino biography of Leonardo according to Charles Hope 

“The life of Leonardo is one of the best written and most literary in the entire book – a memorable portrait of a remarkable man that depends heavily on a brilliant use of anecdotes, which occupy about half the text. The other half consists mainly of factual and biographical material almost entirely drawn, although not always accurately, from the written sources used by Vasari” (p. 16). The consideration on the literary value of the biographical medallion directly implies that it is not the work of Vasari, but of a man of letters. A confirmation would be the fact that, speaking of a design with Neptune and sea monsters, a Latin epigram is immediately quoted. A man of letters, therefore; definitely, however, not too experienced in the life of Leonardo and not too attentive to the sources (the Libro di Antonio Billi and the Manuscript K) if it is true, for example, that the artist is mentioned as a nephew and not as the son of Piero da Vinci [9] . Probably not even a Florentine, given that the cartoon of the Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi, is not mentioned and nothing is said of his work as a draftsman. 

Fig. 2) Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

Overall, a not too informed biography, with some outrageous errors. Hope wonders about the gaps in the biography of da Vinci, when placed in comparison with the accuracy of the biographical medallion dedicated to Raphael: “If one man had written the lives of Raphael and Leonardo, it is difficult to understand why he should have known so much about the Florentine period of the former, but so little about that of the latter (…) The author of the biography of Leonardo in the Torrentiniana, however, manifestly made little if any attempt to discover anything new about Leonardo’s life or activity, and he was notably cavalier in his use of the written material at his disposal. He was evidently a literary figure outside the Florentine artistic community, and the anecdotes which occupy so much of the text, mostly about Leonardo’s attitude to animals and his dissipation of his talents in unproductive dabbling, at best reflect his reputation at mid-century among educated Florentines” (pp. 23-24).

But beyond the reported individual works and the errors in biographical data, the real crux of the analysis is this: “A surprising aspect of the life of Leonardo is that it includes almost nothing about his contribution to the art of his time. There is, of course, the account of the subtlety with which he rendered every feature of the Mona Lisa and indeed of other pictures, and the reference to his study of anatomy, but otherwise his achievement is defined in very limited terms, and consists only of the statement that he added to painting in oils 'a certain darkness from which moderns gave great force and relief to their figures' [10]. In the Proemio [note of the translator: preface] to the third part of the Lives Leonardo’s contribution is defined rather differently. After the statement at the beginning of this section that the distinctive contributions of the modern period involved 'rule, order, measure, design and manner', we are told that Leonardo, 'besides the boldness and perfection of the design, and besides the very accurate reproduction of nature up to perfection, with good rule, better order, straight measure, perfect design and divine grace, abundant of copies and deep in art, really gave to his figures motion and breath, thereby beginning that third way that we want to call the modern one'. Than Giorgione – rather than Leonardo – was singled out for his use of sfumato, and this verdict was repeated in the relevant biography, which is likely to have been written by Vasari himself, since it must be closely based on his travel notes” (p. 24).

The biography of Leonardo, therefore, is considered separately and not in continuity with the preface immediately preceding it. If the preface offers a stylistic judgment and the biography does not, it is simply because they are the output of two different authors. And Hope continues: 

“The lack of specificity about Leonardo’s own artistic personality in the biography is perhaps not surprising if one bears in mind that the author may not have actually seen any paintings by him. Yet Leonardo’s biography is the first in part 3 of the Lives, and this has certainly contributed to the idea he was historically very important. As it happens, this placing is more likely due to an accident that to any considered decision on the part of Vasari and his collaborators. The Torrentiniana is divided into two volumes, the first containing the introduction and parts 1 e 2, the second containing part 3. The gathering in the first volume, which concludes with the life of Perugino, consists of exactly three alphabets, so that the volume ends on the final page of the gathering with the signature Zz. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that part 2 ended at such a neat point by pure chance. Instead, it looks as if the printers decided that the conclusion of the third alphabet was a convenient point to end the volume. Had parts 1 or 2 been any longer, the first life in part 3 would have been that of Perugino. Had they been shorter, Leonardo would also have been included in part 2. Presumably the preface to part 3 was written to accommodate the actual arrangement of lives that had been determined by the printers, rather than the reverse. But the result was that Leonardo became the founder of the modern style, although nothing in his biography or in the preface to part 3 really explains why this was so.” (pp. 24-25). 

Fig. 3) Leonardo da Vinci, St, Anna's cartoon, National Gallery, London

Roberta Battaglia, La vita torrentiniana di Leonardo [11] 

With Roberta Battaglia we move, instead, to the traditional 'front', the one which he has seen the standing work of Paola Barocchi, and in more recent times, Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg. The analysis is completely overturned. Here is how the author begins the essay: "The life of Leonardo in the Torrentino edition of Vasari's Lives is in a key placing, since it is the first one in opening the third age, after the Proemio, and is significantly squeezed between the life of Perugino, which precedes it and which closes the second age, and that of Giorgione that follows. Perugino belongs to an artistic period which, according to Vasari's conception of evolution, has been confined to the past because it was surpassed by Raphael, his student who ‘by far won the master’, and also by Michelangelo. But without any doubt it is Leonardo, as clearly expressed in the preface to the third part, the artist to whom Vasari recognises the merit of having forgotten what was ‘the mistake’ of the masters still tied to the second way, too busy ‘for the excessive study' in the creation of ‘well-designed and error-free’ works, but of ‘a dry and raw and edgy manner’ that were ‘harsh and difficult to the eyes of those looking at them’; this old style is also attributed to the artistic activity by Perugino, although he is recognised a more advanced position than the others, for adding the ‘spirit of readiness and sweetness in the united colours.’ It is up to Leonardo, according to Vasari, the merit of having given ‘principle to that third way that we want to call the modern one’, thanks to its ability to ‘truly give his figures motion and breath’. (...) Vasari proves to see well how strong is the gap that exists between Perugino and Leonardo; a gap that is at all felt at the level of style."

Day and night. The essay of Hope and the one by Battaglia could not be more at odds. For the former the placement of the biography of Leonardo is, in fact, a choice of the printer; for the latter, it is a focal point of the Lives; for Hope, the author of the medallion is a writer paying little attention to earlier sources, for Battaglia, it is obviously Vasari; for the former, the author provides evidence of not having any critical awareness of Leonardo’s artistic activity; for the latter, Vasari has clear awareness of the stylistic differences between Perugino and Leonardo; for the English scholar, the preface is written after the decision to include the life of Leonardo at the beginning of the third part, as a connection between this and the second part, and is anyway clearly separated from the biography of Leonardo; for the Italian scholar, preface and biography are logically united and inseparable from each other. 

Let me be clear: Battaglia has no hesitations in pointing out the inconsistencies and errors of Vasari, but her approach to the works cited appears, in all honesty, the result of a philological analysis, on which Hope seems weaker, as he is engaged to square everything in a pre-packaged thesis. Speaking for example of the (lost) cartoon depicting the Original Sin, the authoress notices that Vasari writes that it is "today in Florence in the happy house of the Magnificent Ottaviano de' Medici, given to him as a gift, not much time before, by the uncle of Leonardo". Now, Ottaviano de Medici died in the spring of 1546. It follows that this passage must have been written before that date. While the authoress does not make this point in the essay (after all, it is not its purpose) the following observation arises: how is it possible that Vasari wrote in his autobiography (see the beginning of the commentary on the article by Hope) that he decided to draft the Lives in the fall of 1846, when part of it was already written in the spring? In other terms: how is it possible that Hope, who calls into question the whole system of the work, however believes precisely and only in the reliability of the statement of Vasari in his autobiography? In reality - and philological studies by now confirmed it with safety - the drafting of the Lives begins long before 1546; perhaps already in 1542 [12]. But then, if the drafting of the Lives is much earlier, one of the strongest arguments of Hope is depleted of robustness: that of the hopelessness to complete such a work in a little over a year. If anything, one has to wonder why Vasari 'lied' on the genesis of the work. Even here, however, it is not necessary to make a Pindaric flight to give an explanation: it is simply a representational strategy. Vasari was in Rome as from 1545 and worked on a task of absolute prestige, i.e. the decoration of the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Palazzo della Cancelleria; a commission he got by the Farnese family. As part of this task, Vasari finds himself one evening at the Palazzo Farnese, surrounded by the most prestigious scholars in Rome in those days. It is in such 'high-level' occasion, in short, that the Lives must be born; and they must be born there because Vasari needs to represent himself as being fully immerged into the cultural circuit of the time, in order to 'sell' himself well to Cosimo de' Medici. 

Vasari had left Florence years before because not appreciated by Cosimo, the same Cosimo who would be the main financier of the publication of his work (but who until mid-1547 was not yet the addressee of the dedication). Giorgio wants to return to Florence. To return to Florence he needs prestige. That's it. 

The truth, Battaglia says, is simply that the Lives (not just that of Leonardo, but all of them) proceed by sedimentation, as is normal in a work of this size. The problem, then, is, if anything, to try to identify the moments of the original draft and those of subsequent insertions. Entries that may arise or result from the acquisition of new data in the travels of Vasari or by the intervention of the Florentine Accademia that collaborated in the revision of the text. The author, in this sense, suggests that the description of the cartoon of St. Anne (almost certainly, the specimen now preserved in the National Gallery) was inserted in the drafting of the Lives at a late moment; in fact, its placing within the narrative of the events of the (never realised) Pala della Santissima Annunziata appears inconsistent with the rest of the text. The date suggested by Battaglia is next to a supposed trip Vasari in Milan in 1548, a circumstance in which the artist from Arezzo could have seen the work. 

In conclusion 

I will try to finish, beating all records of immodesty. If you take one by one all the texts that I published on this blog at my signature as from November 2013 to date, if you put them in a line more or less in chronological order of subject and try to read them all in one breath, you will notice immediately of any inconsistency, discontinuity and stylistic inaccuracies. It is inevitable that it will be like this. But I wrote them all myself. The problem is, if anything, try to understand what I wrote first, and if I intervened or not later on with additions, to fill in the gaps of which I felt the presence. 

Let us now turn to Vasari. He writes a text of 300,000 words over the years. He proceeds by successive sedimentation, gradually adding data and information. From a certain point onwards, however, additions and corrections from third parties are involved. And a little later, he finds himself confronted with the limitations of printing at that time. It is not possible to disassemble and reassemble the pages endlessly; an intervention on a page that has been printed is the exception, not the norm. The printing times are endless. Corrections are made ​​within the subsequent biographies. This, most likely, is what happened. The problem (a puzzle with no solution) is, if anything, to try to understand what has been written before and what was added later on (and by whom). The thesis of Hope, however fascinating it may be, is devoid of any real validation: there is no trace of a Manuscript K, but above all there is no trace of any text sent to Vasari as drafting of an already pre-packaged biography, not made ​​by him. Such evidence does not exist either in the papers or in the archives of Vasari's potential authors, as listed by Hope. The archives, as we well know, are incomplete; but we should imagine a sort of 'pact of silence' that would have been pushed so far to systematically destroy all existing paper-based texts. Frankly, it seems a too fanciful hypothesis. 

NOTES 

[1] It is hardly necessary to recall that the Lives were published – when Vasari was still alive – in two editions, which have always been conventionally distinguished among them by the name of the printer: the so-called Torrentino edition (Torrentiniana), published by Lorenzo Torrentino (1550) and the Giunti edition (Giuntina), indeed published by Giunti in 1568. It is entirely exciting the scope of this article to trace the differences between the two versions (the literature on it is enormous). It suffices to say that, in practice, the Giunti edition is by far the most widespread and the most cited. For a contemporary version of the Lives (in both versions), please refer to fundamental edition edited by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini (published first by Sansoni and then by SPES, from 1966 to 1997). 

[2] Published in The Lives of Leonardo, edited by Thomas Frangenberg and Rodney Palmer, co-published by The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Publisher, 2013, pp. 11-28. This volume contains the papers presented at the conference 'The Lives of Leonardo', held at the Warburg Institute in London in September 2006 (and adds new papers, as indicated by the curators). 

[3] It is known that Giovio was not only a scholar, but also an art critic. In particular, he wrote biographies on Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. The publication of the texts by Giovio, however, occurred only in the eighteenth century. For an extremely convincing analysis of the importance of Paolo Giovio as an art critic in general, and as a source (if only oral) for Vasari's Lives see Barbara Agosti, Paolo Giovio. Uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento (Paolo Giovio. A Lombard historian in the artistic culture of the sixteenth century), Florence, 2008. 

[4] All translations from the English text of Hope are my own. 

[5] Hope points out that the literary qualities of the style by Vasari are normally assumed to be demonstrated by the letters written until 1550 by the artist from Arezzo, but we often forget that they are not originals but copies probably 'upgraded' by Giorgio Vasari the Younger. The autograph letters, however, clearly show the patchy style of the author. 

[6] Francesco Albertini, Memoriale di molte statue et pycture sono nella inclyta cipta di Florentia (Memory on the many statues and paintings included within the walls of Florence) (1510) and Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris Urbis Romae (Booklet on the beauties of the new and old City of Rom)(1510). 

[7] Il Libro di Antonio Billi (Antonio Billi's Book), edited by Annamaria Ficarra, Naples, about 1975. 

[8] L’Anonimo Magliabechiano (The Magliabechi Anonymous), edited by Annamaria Ficarra, Naples, 1968. It has been recently speculated, in my view persuasively, that the Magliabechi Anonymous is the work of Bernardo Vecchietti. See Bouk Wierda (The True Identity of the Anonymous Magliabechiano) in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 53 (2009), pp. 157-168. Available on the Internet at http://www.rug.nl/staff/b.s.wierda/oudereversieartikel.pdf

[9] The error will be corrected in the Giunti edition. 

[10] All quotations of Lives appear in Italian in the text by Hope. They were however translated into English by the translator for this blog, while being marked in italics to still evidence them.

[11] 'The Torrentino Live of Leonardo': published in Giorgio Vasari e il cantiere delle Vite del 1550 (Giorgio Vasari and the production of the Lives of 1550). Proceedings of the Conference held in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, 26 to 28 April 2012, edited by Barbara Agosti, Silvia Ginzburg and Alessandro Nova, Venice, 2013 pp. 247-270. 

[12] See, one for all, Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari. I luoghi e tempi delle Vite (Giorgio Vasari. The times and places of the Lives), Milan, 2013 p. 57.