On the other hand, Vasari gives a comparatively full description of the Triumphs of Caesar which, in a somewhat battered condition, have been for centuries in the British Royal Collection. They have now been cleaned and freed from eighteenth-century repaints, so that they may now be seen in better state of preservation than was feared when the cleaning was begun. They are exhibited in a special gallery built for them at Hampton Court.
Of the other pictures mentioned by Vasari the most famous is the High Altarpiece painted for San Zeno in Verona, where it still is. The Madonna with the heads of angels is now in the Brera in Milan, and the Madonna of the Quarries is in the Uffizi in Florence. The Madonna of Victory, which Vasari records as having been painted in commemoration of a victory over the French, is now, ironically enough, in the Louvre in Paris, where it was placed when Napoleon looted it in the last years of the eighteenth century.
LEONARDO
Leonardo painted relatively few pictures, probably because of the diversity of interests recorded by Vasari. On the other hand, he left many hundreds of drawings, including many scientific ones, for example the studies of the anatomy of the horse and human anatomy, as well as studies for pictures including some drawings on linen, such as those mentioned by Vasari at the beginning of the Life. About half of the surviving pictures attributed to Leonardo are described in some detail by Vasari. They include the unfinished Baptism, now in the Uffizi in Florence, which Vasari records as having been begun by Verrocchio and to which Leonardo added one angel. This must have been one of Leonardo’s earliest works; but two, and probably three, of his most famous paintings are clearly recorded by Vasari. They are the Last Supper, in Milan, now very damaged, the Mona Lisa, in the Louvre, and the large picture, also in the Louvre, of the Madonna and Child with St Anne, which must be the Madonna described by Vasari as having gone to France.
Other pictures certainly by Leonardo which can probably be identified with works mentioned by Vasari are the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi in Florence, on which Leonardo was working in 1481; the Madonna which contained a vase of flowers with dewdrops on it must be the picture in Munich; while the Baptist in the Louvre is probably the picture described by Vasari as ‘an angel with his arm upraised’. The portrait of a woman called Ginevra de’ Benci has been convincingly identified with the portrait of a woman against a background of juniper (ginepra), formerly in the collection of the Princes of Liechtenstein and now in the National Gallery, Washington.
CORREGGIO
Vasari was not particularly well informed about the circumstances of Correggio’s life, but he nevertheless records two of the three main fresco cycles, those in the dome of San Giovanni Evangelista and the cathedral in Parma. The earliest fresco cycle is in a convent in Parma, and Vasari probably never had the opportunity to see it. At least two of Correggio’s major altarpieces are recorded unequivocally – the Madonna with St Jerome, now in the Gallery at Parma, and the Nativity with the light shining from the figure of the Child, which is almost certainly the picture now in Dresden.
Other works recorded by Vasari probably include the Agony in the Garden, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Wellington Museum), and the Deposition from the Cross, in the Parma Gallery, which is probably identifiable with the Dead Christ recorded by Vasari. His mythological pictures include some in Rome, Vienna, and London, but none of these seems to be certainly identifiable with those mentioned by Vasari.
GIORGIONE
The works of Giorgione have always been highly controversial, largely owing to the absence of any considerable body of authenticated work. The frescoes mentioned by Vasari as those which he was unable to interpret on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice have now all but entirely disappeared and are known to us only from eighteenth-century engravings and some faded fragments of the originals. On the other hand, a picture of a woman called Laura, in the Gallery at Vienna, has a contemporary inscription on the back, but the portrait is not mentioned by Vasari and is in rather unsatisfactory condition. The principal work, on which almost all attributions are based, is the large altarpiece in Giorgione’s birthplace, Castelfranco. Vasari says that Giorgione painted there, but he does not specify this work which, because of its close similarity to the late works of Giovanni Bellini, is generally thought to date from very early in Giorgione’s short career.
Many of the other portraits mentioned rather vaguely by Vasari have been identified with existing pictures, but there can be no certainty in these identifications and the problem is made worse by the similarity of style between Giorgione, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo.
RAPHAEL
Raphael died when Vasari was a boy of about nine, but his fame was such and his pupils were so numerous and so nearly contemporary with Vasari that it cannot have been very difficult to gather information about his pictures. The task would have been made somewhat easier because most of Raphael’s mature works, which were the foundation of his enormous reputation, are frescoes in Rome, and the very extent of his reputation made it comparatively easy to find out about works painted in Perugia or Florence while he was still comparatively unknown.
Almost all of the works mentioned by Vasari can be identified without much difficulty; for example, the Sposalizio (which is signed and dated 1504) now in the Brera in Milan, the Madonna of the Gold finch, in Florence, or the Ansidei Madonna, now in the National Gallery, London. Most of the works painted during the last twelve years of Raphael’s career are easily identifiable, and far the most important are the frescoes in the Vatican, the fresco of Galatea, together with the other frescoes on the ceiling of the Loggia, in the Farnesina in Rome, and such works as the tapestries and the great altarpiece of the Transfiguration, in the Vatican Museum. Seven of the cartoons for the tapestries have survived and are on loan from the Royal Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Only two problems are presented by the list of pictures recorded by Vasari. One is the portrait of Pope Julius II, which existed in two versions, in the Pitti and Uffizi Galleries in Florence. The argument over the superiority of the Uffizi version over the one in the Pitti, generally thought to be the copy by Titian which Vasari mentions, was dramatically settled in 1970 when a third version, in the National Gallery, London, was cleaned and revealed itself as undoubtedly the original by Raphael. The second problem is the Madonna which Vasari records as having been painted at the same time as the portrait of Julius and as showing the birth of Christ, with the Virgin covering the child with a veil, and St Joseph near by. There are a good many versions, or rather copies, of this picture, but no one of them is of sufficiently high quality to justify an attribution to Raphael himself. The copies do, however, agree sufficiently closely for us to have a very good idea of the appearance of the original.
MICHELANGELO
We are very well informed on the works of Michelangelo since Vasari wrote his first Life before 1550, while Michelangelo was still alive. In 1553 Michelangelo’s pupil, Ascanio Condivi, wrote an authorized biography intended to correct those parts of Vasari’s Life which Michelangelo himself did not like. These two, together with the final version of Vasari’s Life, written after Michelangelo’s death in 1564, give a very complete account of all his major works. In particular, they record the three great fresco cycles in the Vatican and the cartoon for a fresco in Florence, which was destroyed early in the sixteenth century but is known to us in part from Michelangelo’s preparatory drawings and from an early partial copy now in the collection of the Earl of Leicester.
Michelangelo’s principal works in sculpture, the David and the unfinished figures for the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo, are still in Florence, while the final version of the Tomb of Julius II is in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, and various figures originally made for it but subsequently abandoned are in Florence and Paris. The Pietà in St Peter’s and the Risen Christ made for Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome are both still there, and the Madonna in Bruges is still in the church for which
it was made. Of the late versions of the Pietà two are in Florence, including one in the cathedral which Michelangelo originally intended for his own tomb, while the latest of all, the so-called Rondanini Pietà, is now in the Civic Museum in Milan. An early crucifix recorded as having been made for the church of Santo Spirito in Florence was thought to have been lost for centuries, but late in 1963 it was suggested that a crucifix still in the monastery attached to Santo Spirito is in fact the missing work; it now seems to have won general acceptance.
TITIAN
Vasari himself tells us, in the course of his description of the works of Titian, that he was in Venice in 1566 and paid a call on Titian, who, although he was then a very old man, was still painting and spoke to him at length. From this it is evident that Titian, who did not die until 1576, gave Vasari a considerable amount of information about his works, and it is a fact that Vasari describes more than thirty pictures which can be identified and almost all of which are still in existence. Two important exceptions are the frescoes which Titian painted at the very beginning of his career, along with Giorgione, on die Fondaco the Tedeschi, and the large canvas of the Murder of St Peter Martyr. The frescoes, like Giorgione’s, have disappeared. The other major loss, the altarpiece of St Peter Martyr, is less serious in that copies give us a good idea of the original appearance of the picture. The painting itself was originally in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and was destroyed by fire in 1867, but quite good copies are known, and they confirm the importance of the picture in the history of Venetian painting, since it has a violence of gesture which is echoed in the landscpe and is in harmony with the dramatic nature of the subject.
Several other pictures mentioned by Vasari cannot be identified with absolute certainty: for example, the portrait of Duke Alfonso with a Cannon, which may be identical with a picture in New York, and there are a few other portraits, including those of Charles V and Ippolito de’ Medici in Armour, which do not seem to be identifiable.
Several other pictures are mentioned by Vasari in a rather generalized way, but there is still a long list of positively identifiable works, which would be enough to give us a clear idea of Titian’s development even if we had no other source of information. They include such masterpieces as the frescoes in Padua, the Assumption in the church of the Frari, the Pesaro Madonna, the enormous picture of the Presentation of the Virgin, which is on a wall of what is now the Accademia in Venice, the portraits of Pope Paul III, the three ceilings now in Santa Maria della Salute, the Allegory painted for Charles V, taken by him on his abdication to the monastery at Juste, as well as such famous late works as the pictures of Diana in Vienna and in the collection of Lord Ellesmere, or the Martyrdom of St Lawrence, now in the Escorial near Madrid, which was actually in Titian’s studio when Vasari visited him and was not sent to Spain until December 1567.
FURTHER READING
Vasari on Technique, by Louisa S. Maclehose and G. Baldwin Brown (Dent, 1907; Dover Publications, paperback, 1960): an accurate translation, with useful notes and illustrations, of Vasari’s Introduction to the Lives, his technical treatise on architecture, sculpture, and painting.
Artistic Theory in Italy 1450—1600, by Anthony Blunt (Oxford University Press, first edition, 1940; also in paperback): an illuminating commentary on Renaissance art theory from Alberti to the later Mannerists.
Classic Art, by H. Wölfflinn (Phaidon Press, 1952): first published in 1899, this classic of art history has had a major influence on subsequent art historians and in this illustrated translation makes a very stimulating introduction to the period.
The Art of the Renaissance, by Peter and Linda Murray (Thames and Hudson, 1963; also in paperback).
An Index of Attributions made in Tuscan Sources before Vasari, by Peter Murray (Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 1959) lists the sources that Vasari drew upon.
The High Renaissance (1967), and The Late Renaissance and Mannerism(1967), by Linda Murray, both reprinted and revised as one volume (Thames and Hudson, 1977).
The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, by Peter Murray (Thames and Hudson, 1986).
Introduction to Italian Sculpture, by Sir John Pope-Hennessy, three volumes (Phaidon paperback, 1986).
Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book, by T. S. R. Boase (Princeton University Press, 1979), based on a series of (A. W. Mellon) lectures, is readable and scholarly, fairly well illustrated, critical, but sympathetic to Vasari, and the best general introduction to him in English.
Vasari Pittore, by Paola Barocchi (Milan, 1864): a reasonably well-illustrated essential first book for the study of Vasari as an artist.
Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari, by Paul Barolsky (Pennyslvania State University Press, 1991): a stimulating look at the literary value of the Lives.
Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier, by Satkowski Leon (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Giorgio Vasari: Art and History, by Patricia Lee Rubin (Yale University Press, 1995): an enthusiastic and comprehensive study, with very useful bibliography of sources and secondary literature.
Michelangelo: A Bibliography, by George Bull (Viking, 1995).
Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court edited by Philip Jacks (Cambridge University Press, 1998): this scholarly collection of fourteen essays by ‘Vasarianisti’ of several different disciplines critically examines the aims and methods of Vasari in writing the Lives; the relationship of Vasari’s writing with the development of Italian literature and intellectual life; the implications of his understanding of drawing and his zest and taste as a collector; and his purposive prejudices as a didactic art historian, architect and painter.
1. So called because of the speed with which they were painted. Vasari was a great believer in the virtues of productivity. But when Michelangelo was told that the frescoes were the work of a young painter he remarked: ‘That’s obvious…’ – a story told (without naming the culprit) by Vasari himself.
1. See under: Vasari and the Renaissance Artist.
1. Cf. Artistic Theory in Italy, by Anthony Blunt (Oxford, 1940).
1. Diodorus was Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, who wrote a universal history in forty books, fifteen of which have survived intact.
1. The Iliad, Book XVIII, where Homer describes in great detail Achilles’ ‘large and powerful shield, adorned all over, finished with a bright triple rim of gleaming metal…’, translation by E. V. Rieu (Penguin Books, 1950).
2. Lactantius was a fourth-century Christian writer, author of Divinae Institutiones from which Vasari is quoting.
1. The essay on Slander by Lucian (Greek satirist of the second century A.D.) mentions a painting by Apelles of Slander (or Calumny) preceded by Envy, Intrigue, and Deception.
2. Intaglio consists in cutting forms in a surface to produce a kind of relief in reverse.
3. i.e. Fabius the Painter.
1. The discovery of the figure of the Chimaera (a fire-breathing monster slain by Bellerophon) is also mentioned by Cellini in his Autobiography.
1. Gaiseric.
1. Last king of the Ostrogoths, eventually defeated by the Byzantine general, Narses.
1. The libra (pound) is equivalent to about twelve ounces of the lb. avoirdupois.
1. The Baptistry of San Giovanni, built in the eleventh century or earlier.
2. The Carroccio was the sacred car or chariot, bearing the altar and banner of the Commune.
1. A load was here that scarce a thousand yoke
Of oxen link’d might budge, scarce any ship
Bear o’er the sea; yet, wondrous sight to see
Buschetto’s toil a band of maidens ten
Hath given power to lift it up on high.
2.… on the sixth of April, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, Charles the king of the Franks, coming back from Rome and having entered Florence amid great rejoicing and been welcomed by the citizens with ceremonial dancing, bestowed necklaces of gold upon a large number of them… the Ch
urch of the Holy Apostles. There is inlaid in the altar a leaden plate, on which there is written a record of its foundation and consecration as aforesaid by Archbishop Turpin in the presence of Roland and Oliver.
1. Nicolò Pisano, who lived in the middle of the thirteenth century, along with his son Giovanni is considered to be the founder of ‘modern’ sculpture.
1. ‘Twas Cimabue’s belief that he did hold the field in painting. So in life he did; but now the stars of heaven are his.
2. Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field
In painting; Giotto’s all the rage today;
The other’s fame lies in the dust concealed.
From Dorothy Sayer’s translation (Penguin Books, 1955).
1. Vasari’s collection of drawings – the Libro di Disegni – to which he often refers in the Lives. The book no longer exists; many of the drawings are now in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence.
1. Decameron, 6th day, novella 5.
1. A Tree of the Cross is a picture of the cross with the genealogical tree of Christ composed of medallions of the patriarchs and prophets.
2. Vasari himself did some work for the (still standing) Palazzo di Parte Guelfa built in the fourteenth century for the Captains of the Guelph (or papal) party.
Lives of the Artists Page 52
