Giorgio Vasari
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Giorgio Vasari (July 30, 1511 – June 27, 1574) was an Italian painter and architect, known for his famous biographies of Italian artists.
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[edit] Biography
Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany. At the recommendation by his cousin Luca Signorelli, at an early age he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass. At the age of 16, Cardinal Silvio Passerini sent him to study in Florence, in the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo. His humanist education was not ignored, and he met and knew Michelangelo, whose painting style influenced Vasari's.
In 1529 he visited Rome and studied the works of Raphael and others of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards. He was consistently employed by patrons in the Medici family in Florence and Rome, and he worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places. Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the great Sala di Cosimo I of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, and his uncompleted frescoes inside the vast dome of the Duomo, completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci. He also helped organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio.
As an architect, Vasari was perhaps more successful than as a painter. The loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard, a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if one considered it as a short street, is the unique Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. In Florence Vasari also built the long passage connecting the Uffizi with the Pitti Palace, through arcading across the Ponte Vecchio. Unhappily he did much to injure the fine medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, from both of which he removed the original rood screen and loft, and remodelled the retro-choir in the Mannerist taste of his time.
In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammanati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia.
Vasari enjoyed a high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. In 1547 he built himself a fine house in Arezzo (now a museum honoring him), and spent much labour in decorating its walls and vaults with paintings. He was elected one of the municipal council or priori of his native town, and finally rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere.
In 1563, he helped found the Florence Accademia del Disegno (now the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze), with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution and 36 artists chosen as members.
Vasari died at Florence on June 27, 1574.
[edit] The Vite
As the first Italian art historian, he initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari coined the term "Renaissance" (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air from the time of Alberti. Vasari's work was first published in 1550, and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural), entitled Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (or, in English, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects).
The work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view.
Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, although likely inventions. Others are generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. With a few exceptions, however, Vasari's aesthetic judgment was acute and unbiased. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and the immediately preceding one. Modern criticism—with all the new materials opened up by research—has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. The work remains a classic even today, though it must be supplemented by modern critical research.
Vasari includes a sketch of his own biography at the end of his Vite, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati. The Lives have been translated into French, German and English.
[edit] Biographies
The Vite contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names, which are sometimes used in different ways. The following list respects the order of the book, as divided into its three parts.
[edit] Part 1
- Cimabue
- Arnolfo di Lapo
- Nicola Pisano
- Giovanni Pisano
- Andrea Tafi
- Giotto
- Pietro Lorenzetti (Pietro Laurati)
- Andrea Pisano
- Buonamico Buffalmacco
- Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Ambruogio Laurati)
- Pietro Cavallini
- Simone Martini
- Taddeo Gaddi
- Andrea Orcagna (Andrea di Cione)
- Agnolo Gaddi
- Duccio
- Gherardo Starnina
- Lorenzo Monaco
- Taddeo Bartoli
[edit] Part 2
- Jacopo della Quercia
- Nanni di Banco
- Luca della Robbia
- Paolo Uccello
- Lorenzo Ghiberti
- Masolino da Panicale
- Masaccio
- Filippo Brunelleschi
- Donatello
- Giuliano da Maiano
- Piero della Francesca
- Fra Angelico
- Leon Battista Alberti
- Antonello da Messina
- Alessio Baldovinetti
- Fra Filippo Lippi
- Andrea del Castagno
- Domenico Veneziano
- Gentile da Fabriano
- Vittore Pisanello
- Benozzo Gozzoli
- Vecchietta (Francesco di Giorgio e di Lorenzo)
- Antonio Rossellino
- Bernardo Rossellino
- Desiderio da Settignano
- Mino da Fiesole
- Lorenzo Costa
- Ercole Ferrarese
- Jacopo Bellini
- Giovanni Bellini
- Gentile Bellini
- Cosimo Rosselli
- Domenico Ghirlandaio
- Antonio Pollaiuolo
- Piero Pollaiuolo
- Sandro Botticelli
- Andrea del Verrocchio
- Andrea Mantegna
- Filippino Lippi
- Bernardino Pinturicchio
- Francesco Francia
- Pietro Perugino
- Luca Signorelli
[edit] Part 3
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Giorgione da Castelfranco
- Antonio da Correggio
- Piero di Cosimo
- Donato Bramante (Bramante da Urbino)
- Fra Bartolomeo Di San Marco
- Mariotto Albertinelli
- Rafaellino Del Garbo
- Pietro Torrigiano (Torrigiano)
- Giuliano da Sangallo
- Antonio da Sangallo
- Raphael
- Guglielmo Da Marcilla
- Simone del Pollaiolo (il Cronaca)
- Davide and Benedetto Ghirlandaio (David and Benedetto Ghirladai)
- Domenico Puligo
- Andrea Da Fiesole
- Vincenzo Da San Gimignano
- Andrea Sansovino (Andrea dal Monte Sansovino)
- Benedetto Da Rovezzano
- Baccio Da Montelupo
- Lorenzo di Credi
- Boccaccio Boccaccino(Boccaccino Cremonese)
- Lorenzetto
- Baldassare Peruzzi
- Pellegrino Da Modana
- Giovan Francesco, Detto il Fattore
- Andrea del Sarto
- Francesco Granacci
- Baccio D'Agnolo
- Properzia de’ Rossi
- Alfonso Lombardi
- Michele Agnolo
- Girolamo Santacroce
- Dosso and Dossi (Dossi brothers)
- Giovanni Antonio Licino (Giovanni Antonio Licino Da Pordenone)
- Rosso Fiorentino
- Giovanni Antonio Sogliani
- Girolamo da Treviso (Girolamo Da Trevigi)
- Polidoro da Caravaggio e Maturino da Firenze(Maturino Fiorentino)
- Bartolommeo Ramenghi (Bartolomeo Da Bagnacavallo)
- Marco Calavrese
- Morto Da Feltro
- Franciabigio
- Francesco Mazzola
- Jacopo Palma (Il Palma)
- Lorenzo Lotto
- Giulio Romano
- Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Viniziano)
- Perino Del Vaga
- Domenico Beccafumi
- Baccio Bandinelli
- Jacopo da Pontormo
- Michelangelo Buonarroti
- Tiziano da Cadore (Titian)
- Giulio Clovio, manuscript illuminator
[edit] Copies of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists Online
- “Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.” Website created by Adrienne DeAngelis. Currently incomplete, intended to be unabridged, in English.
- “Le Vite." 1550 Unabridged, original Italian.
- “Stories Of The Italian Artists From Vasari.” Translated by E L Seeley, 1908. Abridged, in English.
- Le Vite - Edizioni Giuntina e Torrentiniana
- Gli artisti principali citati dal Vasari nelle "Vite" (elenco)
[edit] Biographical Information
[edit] References
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics). Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-283410-X
- Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volumes I and II. Everyman's Library, 1996. ISBN 0-679-45101-3
- Vasari on Technique. Dover Publications, 1980. ISBN 0-486-20717-X
- Life of Michelangelo. Alba House, 2003. ISBN 0-8189-0935-8
