How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It - The New York Times 02-04-19 09(41

NONFICTION

How Giorgio Vasari Invented

Art History as We Know It
By Deborah Solomon

Dec. 1, 2017

THE COLLECTOR OF LIVES

Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art
By Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney
Illustrated. 420 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.

It is rare that a biographer of artists becomes the subject of a biography. You don’t
think of biographers as romantic figures or swashbuckling types, and their lives
are not generally momentous. Unlike artists, who are almost professionally
obliged to spread their emotions dazzlingly wide, biographers need to be
organized and neat. They go around collecting the scraps left behind — letters,
diary notes, apartment leases — while lamenting the inevitable gaps in the
documentation surrounding most any life.

Giorgio Vasari did all this, but he did it before anyone else, arguably inventing the
field of art history. His life was as remarkable as that of any of those Renaissance
masters whose adventures he chronicled. Although the vignettes he related were
notoriously untrustworthy, you can choose to be generous and contemplate the
thousands of facts and critical opinions he managed to get right. Ingrid Rowland, a

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How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It - The New York Times 02-04-19 09(41

prominent scholar of Renaissance art and history, and her fellow writer and
historian Noah Charney, wear their erudition lightly in their gracefully written
biography, “The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art.”

Born in 1511 in the town of Arezzo, which is southeast of Florence, Vasari was
esteemed during his lifetime as a painter and an architect who worked for the
mighty Medici clan. Officially, he was a Mannerist painter, which was like being in
a place where the sun is always going down. It was his fate to work in the
aftermath of the High Renaissance, to visit the Vatican and look up at the Sistine
Chapel ceiling and know that the contest wasn’t close. Contemporary artists had
no chance of matching the accomplishments of the past. As a painter, Vasari was
solidly average. But he did possess a talent for admiration. The same habit of
reverence that doomed his artwork to bland imitation served him well as a
biographer.

His magnum opus, “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and
Architects,” was published in 1550, when Vasari was in his late 30s. It offers a
group portrait of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, starting with Cimabue in
the 13th century and culminating 300 years later with Michelangelo, who was
Vasari’s oft-declared favorite and also his friend. Once, in an act of biographical
overtime, Vasari braved a crowd of anti-Medici rioters to rescue an arm of
Michelangelo’s statue “David,” which lay broken on the ground in three pieces, the
casualty of a hurled bench.

Or so Vasari recounts in his “Lives.” He was capable of narrative embellishment

when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic. Rowland and Charney are fully
cognizant of his flaws. They acknowledge that “much of his information is wrong,
sometimes by his own deliberate choice.” They bemoan his frequent use of
unnamed sources. One of his favorite phrases was scrivono alcuni, which means
“some write.” Who was “some”? They must have had Deep Throats in the
Renaissance, too.

Astoundingly, as Rowland and Charney make clear, no one before Vasari had
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How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It - The New York Times 02-04-19 09(41

written a series of artist biographies. There were lives of poets, lives of

philosophers; there were rollicking lives of depraved rulers of the Roman Empire.
But those subjects belonged to the upper classes. Artists, by contrast, were
regarded in much the same way as cobblers or blacksmiths — manually skilled
but with limited formal education, mainly because their learning took place from
an early age in bustling workshops.

Vasari, on the other hand, had studied Latin in his youth and could recite passages
of Virgil from memory. He was uncharacteristically literate for his time and
superbly qualified to write his “Lives.” If some of his stories are hyperbolic, and he
did like to gush, he should be credited for having elevated the prestige of both
artists and art. His achievement was to show how a work of art, unlike a cobbler’s
boot, is not just the product of manual dexterity but of a singular personality that
imposes its own sensibility and rules. Among his best-known anecdotes is that of
Giotto, who in 1304 won an important commission in Rome by demonstrating his

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How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It - The New York Times 02-04-19 09(41

skill in less than one minute. He painted a perfect O in red without moving his
arms or using a compass. Apparently, he just rotated his hand, in a gesture of
stunning conceptual elegance.

What do we know of Vasari’s own origins? He was descended from generations of

potters, and the name Vasari derives from vasaio, the Italian for “potter.” Spurning
the vocation of his father and his grandfather, the young Giorgio took his
inspiration from his great-uncle Luca Signorelli, a well-known Florentine artist
who nurtured his interest in drawing. “Learn, little kinsman,” Signorelli sweetly
exhorted the boy. As his schoolmates played outdoors, Giorgio would sit sketching
inside the cool, quiet space of churches, which is where you went in 1520 if you
wanted to contemplate top-flight examples of painting and sculpture.

In his own telling, Vasari characterizes himself as a frail child who suffered from
chronic nosebleeds. His great-uncle Luca proved useful in this area, too. He tried
to stanch the boy’s bleeding with stones reputed to have healing powers. As Vasari
recounts, after Luca heard that “my nose bled so copiously that I sometimes
collapsed, he held a piece of red jasper to my neck with infinite tenderness.”

Vasari’s mother is treated by the authors with puzzling dismissiveness. When we

meet Maddalena Tacci, we are told nothing about her, only that Vasari once joked
that she gave birth to another child “every nine months.” Today, such a joke does
not register as funny, and it would have behooved the authors to tell us how many
children Maddalena had, or where Giorgio figured in the birth order (in fact he
was the firstborn son).

In 1527, when Vasari was 16 and studying in Florence, he learned that his father
died of the plague that had descended on his hometown. A few years later, when
he was living in Bologna, Vasari decided to return home to Arezzo because he was
“worried about how his brothers and sisters were faring without their parents,” as
the authors write.

BOOK REVIEW | How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art Histor…

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How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It - The New York Times 02-04-19 09(41

BOOK REVIEW | How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art Histor…

Yet his mother was
BOOK still alive then. She outlived her husband by three decades,
REVIEW
dying in 1558, according to standard reference books, such as the Grove
Dictionary of Art. It is a little strange, in a biography of this quality, to find the
mother of the protagonist rubbed out, as in one of those Disney films in which the
moms are killed off at the outset in the interest of dramatizing the embattled
status of the hero.

As such an oversight might suggest, the biography as a whole settles for

breeziness and even glibness when close analysis is needed. The missing
information about Vasari’s family life is unsettling precisely because Vasari
tended to view artists as if they made up a big Italian family. By connecting artists
whose lives spanned three centuries, he produced one of the first books to insist
on the continuity of art. Long before Harold Bloom advanced his theory about the
“anxiety of influence,” Vasari recognized that the struggle for artistic excellence
pits living artists against the most formidable precursors.

It took an audacious leap for Vasari to see himself as the defining chronicler of his
era, the preserver of life stories, the collector of paper scraps. You might say,
based on his recollections of his sickly childhood, that he began life as a sensitive
boy alert to the threat of physical extinction. In his work, he attached himself
imaginatively to a family that would never die — the family of art history, in which
he continues to hold a place of pride as its industrious and chatty paterfamilias.

Deborah Solomon, the art critic of WNYC Public Radio, is currently at work on a biography of the artist Jasper
Johns.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 3, 2017, on Page 52 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Making Art History

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