Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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For eleven years, from 2004 to 2015, the
Berlin publisher Klaus Wagenbach issued the new German version of Vasari's Vite, i.e. the Lives, with an original new translation after over a hundred years
from the previous one. However, the element that undoubtedly characterized the
publishing endeavour is that the Lives have been "chunked" in
individual pocket volumes. 45 of them were released (the last one, dedicated to
Giotto, was published in September 2015). Each of them displays Vasari’s individual
medallions of the artists (or, in some cases, groups of biographies) and has a
new very pleasant layout: it opens with a brief presentation, continues with the
text of the German translation (using the Giuntina version of the Lives 1568,
but also reporting variants compared to the 1550 Torrentiniana version), an apparatus
of notes, indicating the current location of the works identified, and
concludes with an iconographic corpus and the essential bibliography.
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| The Stand of the Publishing House Klaus Wagenbach at the Frankfurt 2015 Book Fair |
And indeed, at the recent Frankfurt Book
Fair, Giorgio Vasari was the ‘most successful’ Italian author. The completion
of the series was also reviewed in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. You
can read the article [in Italian] by Ranieri Polese clicking here.
At the conclusion of this series (and
substantially simultaneously with a scientific conference dedicated to the work,
which was held at the Bode Museum in Berlin on Oct. 7, 2015), I am very glad to
interview Alessandro Nova, who is the curator of the series itself. Mr Nova – I
should like to recall it - is Managing Director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut - Max Planck Institute in Florence.
Q - Dear Professor, how did you find the idea of a
new German edition of Vasari? And why did you choose to present it in 45 small volumes?
After teaching at Stanford in California
for nearly eight years, I moved to Frankfurt for family reasons in 1994. Here I
had won the competition for the only professorship in Germany specifically dedicated
to the art of Italian Renaissance. Teaching is very important in Germany and
the professors were giving courses from eight to ten hours a week, for a total
of 240 (sometimes 270) hours per year. The time for research was limited and
then I thought I would share a course-research project with students, also because
I had noticed that the knowledge of the Italian language, once mandatory for
those studying the history of art, was no longer adequate to the level of
University studies. With a small group I started translating the lives of Leonardo,
Giorgione and Correggio, i.e. the beginning of the ‘modern manner’ section in
the Lives, because, in these cases,
the differences between the first and second edition are remarkable and the Torrentiniana
version (1550) was not translated into German (nor has it ever been translated
into any other language but Italian with the only exception of Portuguese).
We published those three lives with the publisher
Olms and with the help of the DFG (the German Research Foundation), which for
two years funded the theses of the students with grants. Later on, the idea took shape of
translating the entire third part of the Lives,
providing it with a glossary and a review of all the people and the works
cited, since this comment was left unfinished in the Italian text [note of the
editor: the Bettarini-Barocchi edition]. Therefore, we moved from the results
of a small workshop to a project of considerable size.
Why did we publish the work in several
volumes? This is the most objectionable feature of our edition. The Lives should be always seen as an indivisible entity
and I always taught my students never to lose sight of the complexity, consistency
and completeness of the two editions. It was however a huge program that
occupied us for eleven years, because the German publisher Klaus Wagenbach
meanwhile asked us to translate and comment all the Lives of 1568, not only those of the third part. I immediately
understood that I could not ask my students, who needed to graduate and to work
at the same time, such a big sacrifice without getting any feedback of the job
done. In all this time we produced 8,800 pages! Do you think someone would have
followed me if I could not offer them something concrete? And who would have
published this "monster" at the end of a job that would last years? The
small and elegant illustrated volumes met considerable success and offered further
encouragement for my students. We reached about 70,000 sold copies and this is
an important signal for the future of Italian art in Germany. As regards the
necessary philological harmony of the text, we will catch up once the edition
of 1550 will appear in a few years, always published by Wagenbach, in a single
volume. By now, almost all my young friends achieved a nice "career"
progress and can certainly be more relaxed on the final result.
Q - Who formed the working group that oversaw the
individual biographies?
The initial group was composed of a small
number of students: first of all Sabine Feser and Victoria Lorini, who then
became the official translator of the Lives.
We could define them the DFG-Olms group. To them we added almost immediately
some bright students like Katja Burzer, Matteo Burioni and Hana Gründler who
were soon appointed as co-publishers of the work. At the end, we have been
joined by Fabian Jonietz, but many other Frankfurt students have commented the
individual Lives. Over the years, my
role has decreased; I am an expert in the sixteenth century art, but I do not have
total control over the bibliography dedicated to the art of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. I was not able anymore to correct the texts of students with
absolute competence and therefore I turned to specialists of the artists. For
example, the commentary on the life of Donatello was written by Ulrich
Pfisterer, professor at the University of Munich and leading expert on the sculptor.
I was very pleased to see that several university colleagues were ready to
participate in the enterprise. This confirmed the quality of the work done
until then. However, the original group is responsible for 90% of the comments.
Q - How did you approach the translation work? Did you
choose a translation that would remain the most possibly literally close to the
original or did you somehow 'refresh' Vasari’s language?
From the beginning, I asked my students to
remain faithful to the linguistic structure of the Lives, reproducing repetitions and even redundancies in the text. A
translation can never be identical to the original, but we have tried to
respect the length of Vasari’s paragraphs and translate its text almost word
for word. In this
effort, we sometimes came across sentences that did not have any clear
grammatical meaning; even in these cases we have not tried to force the
translation by interpreting freely Vasari’s thinking, but we respected the
inconsistency of the text and referred to it in a footnote.
Q - What is the literary value of Vasari’s biographies,
in your view?
I always wanted to pass my students this
message: Vasari’s Lives are a piece of literature and not just "a source" for
visual arts. Many of the introductory texts and the conclusion of the Lives refer to this aspect and I believe
that we should read the masterpiece by Vasari as part of the debates arisen
around the “questione della lingua”
[note of the translator: the so-called ‘dispute on the language’ was the old-dated
debate on which literary use should be made of vernacular Italian, and which
local Italian language should be selected to this aim].
Q - Is there today, in your opinion, a
problem of the absence of a user-friendly version of Vasari's Lives in Italy? How realistic is it to
think about an approach like yours even for Italian readers?
Of course, the Italian reader can count on the
integral edition of Vasari’s works by Paola Barocchi and on the issue of the Torrentiniana
version by Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi, published by Einaudi in the Millenni series. In Italy, the Lives are back in fashion and there are
many historians, including Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg with which we
organized a conference on the first edition of the Lives at the Kunsthistorisches
Institut in Florence or Massimiliano Rossi, who studied Vasari’s text in
depth. However,
I do not think that a new edition of the Lives is necessary, at least today.
Q -
From the editorial point of view, who is the typical reader whom you addressed?
Did he change over the eleven years? Do you know who reads Vasari in the early
twenty-first century?
The typical reader is a University student and
has not changed over the eleven years. I would hope that my colleagues read the original... But I do know
that many of our volumes, I think for example of the beautiful comment by Hana
Gründler to the Life of Raphael, are often consulted by scholars, also for
preparing scientific articles. For the publisher Wagenbach, moreover, it was essential to reach a
wider audience and we believe we have succeeded, as confirmed by the
encouraging data sales.
Q - Was
there a different historical perspective in the German reading of Vasari over
the centuries, compared to the Italian one?
The large volume by Wolfgang Kallab, entitled
Vasaristudien [Studies on Vasari] (1908), opened the modern studies dedicated to the Lives in the context of the attention which the so-called Vienna
School paid for the "sources" of art history. Julius von Schlosser rightly
preferred to use the term Kunstliteratur. Kallab’s work was honoured with a conference dedicated to
Vasari's Lives at the Kunsthistorisches
Institut in Florence in 2008. It had been recognised by the best Italian
historiography: to quote one name for all, by Paola Barocchi. In fact, I would
not say that the historiographical prospects are or have been different. Of
course the worldwide decline of interest in Italian art means that you have to
explain things today that were once taken for granted.
Q - What does Vasari mean for German culture today?
Hard to say. I was myself very surprised by
the success of our endeavour. The name of Vasari is known and respected: this
is already a comforting fact. In Germany there is still an average educated audience
who loves Italy, its culture and its art. Vasari is a central figure of this
world, but it certainly is a plant that must be still cultivated, also in a
perspective that becomes more and more global every day.
Q – On what themes focused the recent scientific
conference in Berlin?
The conference in Berlin did not want to be
overly triumphant, on the contrary. Therefore, the reports by Andreas Beyer and Tanja Michalsky, for
example, did accurately document Vasari’s ideology, highlighting the
shortcomings of his book. Beyer analysed the cases of Palladio, Cellini and Arcimboldi, who
were all marginalized or ignored altogether by Vasari, arguing that Palladio’s
approach, whose four -part book did not display either a portrait or an autobiography,
was more "modern" as it focused on the works, rather than on biographies. Michalsky instead analysed the
case of Naples, what Giovanni Previtali once called the ‘questione meridionale’ [note of the interpreter: the issue of Southern
Italy’s backwardness] in the history of Italian art. Marco Ruffini, finally, analysed a document conserved in the library
of the Yale University and advanced a hypothesis that, if found to be correct, would
revolutionise the study of the birth of Vasari’s text; it would recover, thanks
to highly accurate comparisons, the lost manuscript mentioned in a letter of
1547. In short, Vasari is an infinite treasure.
Q -
How do you explain that the main work of Schlosser, published originally in
Vienna, is now much better known in Italy than in the German world, to the
point that his Italian title (Letteratura
artistica – the title of this blog) has become the official name of the
entire discipline of studying the sources of art history in Italy, while the
German title (Kunstliteratur) has no
general meaning in the German world?
In Germany, there are no teaching posts of
art criticism and perhaps this can explain your question. Moreover, as in all
countries of the world, and even in Italy, students are becoming more and more interested,
for various reasons, in the study of contemporary art. Few of them are ready to
cope with complex texts written in other languages, sometimes with old-fashioned
terminology. However the interest for the Kunstliteratur is recovering strength, thanks in part to our edition that has
served as the catalyst. A large group of scientists is preparing the first
German edition of the Lives of Giovan Pietro Bellori and Anna Schreurs and her
team commented with great insight the Kunstakademie [Art Academy] of Joachim von Sandrart. In short, something is moving. I add
that two Japanese professors are translating Vasari in their language and that
their comments are based largely on our own.
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| One of the Volumes of the Forthcoming Japanese Edition of Vasari's Lives |
Q -
Wagenbach is a great connoisseur of Italy, and his publishing house contributed
over the last fifty years to the dissemination of Italian contemporary literature
and nonfiction in Germany. Now that the Vasari edition has been finished, will there
be any new surprises in the field of artist’s literature?
As I think I have already said, we are preparing the German version of the Lives in the 1550 edition: the first-ever non Italian, even outside of Germany.
Q -
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, the publisher announced the move
of its archives to the State Library in Berlin, to make it possible for researchers
to study them. Are there aspects that should attract the attention of the scholars
of art sources?
Wagenbach is a great scholar of Kafka and is primarily concerned with literature. However, the archive contains a rich correspondence with the Einaudi publishing house for a German translation of the first edition of the Lives. Then it all came to nothing. We hope to do it now, in a reasonable time.
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