LIVES OF THE ARTISTS
VOLUME I
GIORGIO VASARI was born in 1511 at Arezzo in Tuscany. While still a boy he was introduced to Cardinal Silvio Passerini who put him to study in Florence with Michelangelo – who later became a close friend – then with Andrea del Sarto. He left Florence when his patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated, and wandered round Italy filling his notebooks with sketches; it was during this period that he conceived the idea of the Lives. By now, in his thirties, Vasari was a highly successful painter and when his Lives were published they were received enthusiastically. He returned to Florence in 1555 to serve Duke Cosimo, who appointed him architect of the Palazzo Vecchio. After a grand tour of Italian towns he published the revised and enlarged edition of his Lives in 1568. Vasari spent the rest of his life in a glow of self-satisfaction and public recognition, and in 1571 he was knighted by Pope Pius V. He died in 1574.
GEORGE BULL was an author and journalist who translated six volumes for Penguin Classics: Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, The Book of the Courtier by Castiglione, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (two volumes), The Prince by Machiavelli and Pietro Aretino’s Selected Letters, as well as Aretino’s The Stablemaster in Five Italian Renaissance Comedies. After reading History at Brasenose College, Oxford, George Bull worked for the Financial Times, Mc Graw-Hill World News, and for the Director magazine, of which he was Editor-in-Chief until 1984. He was appointed Director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute in 1986. He was a director of Central Banking Publications and the founder and publisher of the quarterly publications Insight Japan and International Minds. His books include Vatican Politics; Bid for Power (with Anthony Vice), a history of take-over bids; Renaissance Italy, a book for children; Venice: The Most Triumphant City; Inside the Vatican; a translation from die Italian of The Pilgrim: The Travels of Pietro della Valle; and Michelangelo: A Biography (Penguin, 1996; St Martin’s Press NY, 1997). George Bull was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981 and a Vice-President of the British-Italian Society in 1994. He was awarded an OBE in 1990. George Bull was made Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory in 1999, and awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (Japan) in 1999. He died on 6 April 2001.
GIORGIO VASARI
LIVES OF THE
ARTISTS
VOLUME I
A SELECTION TRANSLATED BY
GEORGE BULL
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published as Lives of the Artists 1965
Reprinted with minor revisions 1971
Reprinted as Lives of the Artists: Volume I 1987
25
Copyright © George Bull, 1965
All rights reserved
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Vasari’s Lives
Vasari and the Renaissance Artist
Translator’s Note
THE LIVES
Preface to the Lives
Cimabue
Giotto
Preface to Part Two
Uccello
Ghiberti
Masaccio
Brunelleschi
Donatello
Piero della Franceses
Fra Angelico
Alberti
Fra Filippo Lippi
Botticelli
Verrocchio
Mantegna
Preface to Part Three
Leonardo da Vinci
Giorgione
Correggio
Raphael
Michelangelo
Titian
NOTES ON THE ARTISTS
FURTHER READING
For Catherine and Jennifer
INTRODUCTION
VASARI’S LIVES
IN the second edition of the Lives, which was seen through the press in Florence in 1568, Giorgio Vasari informed his fellow artists that of the large number of volumes printed of the first edition, eighteen years before, not one had been left on the booksellers’ hands. A best seller when they were first published four hundred years ago, his biographies of the artists of the Renaissance have over the centuries maintained both their wide popular appeal and their immense historical value.
Vasari was born in 1511 (about the time Henry VIII came to the throne of England) in Arezzo, a Tuscan town which was subject to the Republic of Florence. He was a year old when by force of Spanish arms the Medical family were restored to power in Florence (to rule there almost without interruption for over two hundred years). As he grew up the dynastic conflict between France and Spain, in which Florence became a pawn in the Spanish camp, was caught up in the shattering turmoil of the Reformation. When he died in his early sixties the Catholic world was busy on harsh internal reform and offensive military action against Protestant states and rulers. The city state of Florence had long since settled down to the paternal rule of a Medici duke. Still developing vigorously in the north of Europe, in Italy the ideas and attitudes of the Renaissance were being modified or reversed by an alien spirit in art and life.
Though a fairly pious Catholic and a fierce patriot, Vasari was not the slightest bit interested in the religious and political issues of his time: the faintest whiff of gunpowder or heresy was enough to send him running for cover. Like Uccello, murmuring about the beauties of perspective as his wife nagged him to come to bed, like his contemporary Benvenuto Cellini, a braver but not a better man, Vasari was obsessed by art: the pictures and plans he was pouring out himself, the products and performance of his fellow artists. Nevertheless, the Lives were shaped by the historical circumstances of sixteenth-century Italy: autocratic governments in Rome and Florence, a balance between freedom of movement and incipient censorship of thought, and a newly established role for the artist in society, partly servant to the court and the people and partly a professional answerable to himself and God alone.
At the end of the Lives Vasari included a ‘Description’ of his own works. From this and from what he tells us elsewhere emerges an autobiography which is generally unexciting in itself but valuable for the light it throws on the genesis of the Lives.
He came of a family of tradesmen (the name Vasari derives from vasaro or vasaio, a potter) which had already given one famous name to art, that of Luca Signorelli, the cousin of Giorgio’s grandfather, who gave Giorgio some of his first lessons in drawing. His father, Antonio Vasari, was none too well off (Giorgio was the eldest son of a very big family) but tolerably well connected. He encouraged Giorgio’s talen
t for drawing (as a child, Giorgio copied ‘all the good pictures to be found in the churches of Arezzo’); then in 1524 he used a family connexion to give the boy his big chance, taking him along to pay his respects to Cardinal Silvio Passerini, who was passing through Arezzo on his way, as representative of the newly elected Medici Pope, Clement VII, to take over the government of Florence during the minority of Alessandro and Ippolito de’ Medici.
When he saw that the boy, who was no more than nine [sic] years old… had been so well taught that he knew by heart a great part of Virgil’s Aeneid, which he had him recite, and heard that he had been taught how to draw by the French painter Guglielmo da Marsiglia, he told Antonio to bring him to Florence.
Vasari recounts that the cardinal put him to study with Michelangelo in Florence, but almost immediately Michelangelo was called to Rome and he was placed with Andrea del Sarto instead. One would like to know more about the first, providential encounter between the middle-aged Michelangelo and the young Vasari. For over the years Michelangelo came increasingly to value and encourage Giorgio’s enthusiastic friendship and Vasari came to idolize Michelangelo as an artist and to revere him as a man; the scheme and structure of the Lives, published a quarter of a century after they first met, depend completely on the climax provided by the Life of Michelangelo.
After a good start, with Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli as his teachers, Vasari’s first few years as a practising artist were fairly harassed and precarious. His father died of the plague, leaving him a family to support; Florence – in revolt against the Medici in 1527 and besieged in 1529 – was for some years a centre of unrest and war. A busy and fruitful interlude was cut short in 1537, when his patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated. This was a crushing blow to Vasari’s hopes and self-esteem.
I found myself [he wrote later] robbed of all the expectations held out by his favour… and I determined no longer to seek my fortune at court but to follow art alone, though I could easily have had a position with the new duke, Cosimo de’ Medici.
Vasari’s immediate reaction to the death of Alessandro was to become ill: he had a nervous breakdown. After he recovered, for four years he refused to return to Florence. During this period, however, and after he again set up house in Florence in 1540, he worked busily, wandering from town to town as far south as Naples, covering canvases and walls with pictures for a variety of patrons and, more fortunately for posterity, filling his notebooks with sketches of the works he saw on his travels. The idea of writing the Lives took shape.
By now, in his thirties, Vasari was a highly successful painter, his services constantly in demand and well paid for, the employer of a band of assistants and a propertied man with influential friends, of considerable standing among his fellow artists. He was argued into marriage by one of his friends and patrons, Cardinal del Monte (the future Julius III). The Lives were published and acclaimed.
At length, in 1555, he returned to serve the Medici rulers of Florence, appointed by Duke Cosimo as architect for the Palazzo Vecchio and sacrificing his freedom for erratic but powerful patronage and the status of official artist and impresario. He corresponded on terms of growing familiarity with Michelangelo, founded in Florence in 1563 the first of the new academies of art – the Accademia del Disegno– which exactly institutionalized the professional and academic purposes of the artists of the time, and arranged elaborate ceremonies and decorative schemes for the ruling family. In preparation for the second edition of the Lives he went on a grand tour of Italian towns, checking his facts, gathering new material and consulting with friends. When the revised and far bulkier edition was published, at fifty-seven, he was the respected doyen of the art world of Rome and Tuscany.
The remaining six years of his life were spent in a glow of self-satisfaction and public recognition (his work for Pope Pius V won him a knighthood in 1571), punctuated by worries about his health and his salary and by tiffs with other artists, but otherwise happily devoted to vast and uninspired decorative projects in Rome and Florence, including notably the decoration of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. He and Grand Duke Cosimo – grown very fond of each other – died in the same year, 1574.
Vasari’s artistic labours were dwarfed by the stature and success of the Lives. His work as an architect can be judged from the Uffizi Palace, the Palazzo dei Cavalieri at Pisa, the tomb of Michelangelo in Santa Croce, in Florence, and the Loggie in Arezzo. His principal paintings are the large frescoes representing the history of Florence and the Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio, the ‘100 days’ fresco’ 1 in the Sala della Cancelleria, in the Palazzo San Giorgio at Rome, and the frescoes painted in the Sala Regia, at the Vatican, for Pius V. In addition, he left for posterity a host of crowded canvases, displaying his erudition and his virtuosity.
Until fairly recently Italian art of the years 1520–1600, loosely labelled Mannerist, was regarded as essentially decadent. The name has now fallen into some disfavour, as failing to define the complex and in some cases strongly opposed trends in the art of this period. None the less, Vasari’s own highly competent productions still find no admirers. With their rhetoric and fussiness and emphasis on the human figure, they typified the ‘court art’ practised at Florence under the autocracy of Cosimo, lacking the clarity and boldness of earlier Florentine painting, and untouched by spiritual grandeur. When Robert Carden wrote Vasari’s biography early this century he commented:
It may be urged by those who are acquainted with the works executed by Giorgio Vasari, both in architecture and painting, that they are not such as to merit the serious labour involved by an extended biography: and with this view I am in entire agreement.
The sarcasm is a little harsh.
So, too, have been the judgements passed on Vasari himself over the years. His first influential denigrator was Benvenuto Cellini in the pages of whose outrageous Autobiography Vasari is shamelessly abused. Cellini describes, for example, how once he gave ‘little Giorgio’ hospitality in Rome only to have him turn his house upside down and, sharing a bed with an apprentice, tear the skin off the young man’s legs when scratching with ‘those filthy little claws whose nails he never cut’. Vasari, through Cellini’s eyes, appears as a time-server, a liar, and a coward. Cellini, of course, was a monster of prejudice. Vasari quite clearly had a gift for friendship, winning and holding the affection of Michelangelo himself in a way not to be explained simply by Michelangelo’s appreciation of the useful publicity which his compatriot could provide. As it is, what Vasari was like emerges clearly and fully from the Lives themselves; the writing conveys the man, with his conventional wisdom, his respect for the authorities, his lack of guile, but his eye for the main chance, his unsophisticated humour, his delight (so long as they were not too outlandish) in the quirks of the artistic temperament, his fondness for money, and his unflagging enthusiasm and frequent perspicacity. A translator gets to know his subject too well not to end by liking him immensely, for his human failings as much as anything else. The leader can judge Vasari for himself.
But it is time to come to the book. From his earliest years Vasari was a keen collector of the drawings of the great masters and of stories about them. Of the drawings, Vasari made his Libro di disegni, to which he refers very often in the Lives. The fabulous collection no longer exists, though many of the items are extant. He tells in his own biography how the idea of a great history of the artists was finally formed.
When in 1546 he was decorating the Cancelleria in Rome for Cardinal Farnese he used to go along in the evenings and join the cardinal while he was having supper and enjoying the conversation of various artists and writers such as the poet Francesco Maria Molza, Annibale Caro, translator and littérateur, and Paolo Giovio, the biographer and art collector. On one of those evenings
the conversation turned to Giovio’s museum and the portraits of famous men that he has collected.… Giovio said that he had always wanted and would still like to have as well as his museum and his book of eulogies a treatise di
scussing all illustrious artists from the time of Cimabue up to the present. Enlarging on this, he showed that he enjoyed considerable judgement and understanding in regard to the arts. But it must be said that, talking in general terms, he was careless about details and often made up stories about the artists.… When Giovio had finished this discourse the cardinal turned to me and said:
‘What do you say, Giorgio? Would this not be a fine work?’
‘Splendid,’ I answered, ‘if Giovio were to be helped by someone of the profession to put things in the right places and to describe matters as they really were. I’m saying this because although what he told us was admirable he had changed and confused many things’
Then, urged on by Giovio, Caro, Tolomei, and the others, the cardinal added: ‘Then you could give him a catalogue of all these artists and their works, listed in chronological order…’
This I readily promised to do, as best I could, though I knew it was really beyond my powers. And so I started to look through my memoranda and notes, which I had been gathering on this subject since my childhood as a pastime and because of the affection I bore towards the memory of our artists, every scrap of information about whom was precious to me. Then I put together everything that seemed relevant and took the material along to Giovio.…
Giovio, adds Vasari, persuaded him to undertake the complete work himself. And he agreed to this, intending, however, to publish it under a name other than his own.
Some doubts have been cast on the reliability of Vasari’s account of the famous dinner-party at Cardinal Farnese’s when the subject of the Lives was broached. By then, he was already collecting his material. The substantial accuracy of his account, however, is accepted. In gathering his material, checking his facts, writing and revising the Lives, Vasari was heavily dependent on the help and ideas of others. He leaned, above all, for literary advice on his friend (‘they’re really one, though they seem two’, said Cellini) the Florentine prior, Vincenzo Borghini. He pressed into his service all kinds of sources, occasionally to the point of plagiarism: traditions handed down by word of mouth, the recollection of his own friends and correspondents, and the considerable body of written material already in existence (the Commentaries of Ghiberti, for example, the anonymous Life of Brunelleschi, Boccaccio’s Decameron and many other biographies, chronicles, commentaries, and records).
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