Lives of the Artists

by Giorgio Vasari

  1. ‘Why, sure,’ I cried, ‘that’s Oderisi’s face,

  Honour of Gubbio and the art they call

  Illuminating, in the Paris phrase!’

  ‘Brother,’ said he, ‘a touch more magical

  Smiles now from Franco of Bologna’s page;

  Some honour’s mine, but his is all in all.’

  (Sayers’s translation.)

  1. The order of Camaldoli was a monastic order of hermits founded in 982.

  1. I turn now to the disposal of my other possessions. To my lord of Padua aforementioned, both since he by God’s grace is not in want, and since I have nothing else worthy of him, I leave my portrait or rather representation of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the great painter Giotto, which was left to me by my friend Michèle Vannis of Florence; the ignorant do not comprehend its beauty, but the masters of the art wonder at it; to my lord then I bequeath this painting, in hope that the Blessed Virgin herself may intercede for him with her Son Jesus Christ…

  2. Moreover (to turn from ancient to modern, from abroad to home) I have known two painters of greatness, not of mere prettiness, Giotto of Florence, whose reputation is immense among contemporary artists, and Simone of Siena. I have also known a number of sculptors…

  1. Poliziano – Angelo Ambrogini – one of the most brilliant of the Italian humanists.

  2. That man am I, by whose accomplishment

  The painter’s art was raised from the dead.

  My hand as ready was as it was sure;

  What my skill lack’d, Nature lack’d too; no one

  Was privileg’d more fully life to paint

  Or better paint. Dost thou admire a tower

  In beauty echoing with sacred chime?

  By my design this too reach’d for the stars.

  But I am Giotto; why recite these deeds?

  My name alone is worth a long-drawn ode.

  1. Vasari’s earlier and subsequent borrowings from Pliny (A.D. 23–79) are from the Natural History, Books VII, XXXIV-XXXVII.

  1. These were wooden circles or hoops which, covered with cloth, formed part of a man’s headgear in fifteenth-century Florence.

  1. Terra verde is a natural green earth used for monochrome painting.

  1. Sir John Hawkwood, an Englishman who soldiered as a condottiere in fourteenth-century Italy.

  1. Uccello died in 1475, and was buried in the church of Santo Spirito.

  1. The book is Ghiberti’s Commentarii, a work sketching the development of art, with a notable autobiographical section on which Vasari drew heavily, and of which an English translation is included in Ludwig Goldscheider’s Ghiberti (Phaidon, 1949). Ghiberti was the son of Cione di Ser Bonaccorso and Monna Fiore, who later married Bartolo (Bartoluccio), Lorenzo’s step-father. However, at one time Ghiberti was alleged to be the illegitimate child of Bartoluccio and Monna Fiore, born before Cione’s death.

  1. Vasari wrote ‘ear-rings’. In his Ghiberti Ludwig Goldscheider reminds us that: ‘In the early days of the Renaissance a Florentine would walk into an artist’s workshop… and would there give his orders – for anything from a decorated button to a painted altarpiece or a marble tomb could be ordered in the same workshop.’

  1. In fact, Lodovico degli Obizzi and Bartolommeo Valori.

  1. The most noble brothers Cosirno and Lorenzo, in their zeal and faithful love and at their own expense, have had these neglected remains enshrined for veneration in this coffer of bronze.

  2. Here are bestowed the bodies of Christ’s holy martyrs Protus, Hyacinthus, and Nemesius.A.D.1428.

  1. Vasari (or his printer) made the number of reclining figures twelve and the number of circles thirty-four.

  1. For the sense and implications of decorum in this context see the note on Vasari and the Renaissance Artist.

  1. Bonaccorso was Ghiberti’s grandson.

  1. He died aged seventy-seven.

  2. Made by the wondrous skill of Lorenzo Cio, of the Ghiberti.

  1. Silly Billy, or sloppy Tom.

  1. Fra Filippo Lippi.

  1. Our Lady of the Snow – Santa Maria della Neve – a title for the Virgin which sprang from the legend that Santa Maria Maggiore was built following a miraculous fall of snow during the month of August.

  1. Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Filippo.

  1. O jealous Fate, why doth thy finger fell

  Asunder pluck the threads of youth’s first bloom?

  Countless Apelles this one slaying slays;

  In this one death there dies all painting’s charm.

  With this sun’s quenching, all the stars are quench’d;

  Beside this fall, alas! all beauty falls.

  1. Niello is the art of engraving on silver.

  1. In fact, in 1417.

  1. Here, and elsewhere, macigno is usually translated as ‘grey-stone’.

  1. Here, as elsewhere, the braccio – equivalent to about twenty-three inches – is taken as two feet.

  1. The stone balcony built by Vasari for the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa can still be seen in the Via Capaccio.

  1. Both the magnificent dome of this famous church, and the many other devices contrived by the genius of Filippo the architect, bear witness to his superb skill. Wherefore, in tribute to his exceptional talents and his remarkable virtue, a grateful country has bidden that his body of blessed memory be buried here in this soil below. 17 April 1446.

  1. Tal, sopra sasso sasso,

  Di giro in giro eternamente io ttrussi:

  Che cosí passo passo

  Alto girando al ciel mi ricondussi.

  1. Better known as Orsanmichele.

  1. The commercial tribunal of Florence.

  1. The Palazzo Vecchio.

  1. The Goddess of Sculpture wished that Donatello should receive the highest honour from the people of Florence, inasmuch as he alone, in his one lifetime, had by his boundless works most amply restored to her that splendour and renown, earned for her of old by great artists over long centuries, which through the damage wrought by time’s passing she had lost; and had won for his most worthy country the glory of this restoration.

  1. Quanto con dotta mano alla scultura

  Giá fecer molti, or sol Donato ha fatto:

  Renduto ha vita a’ Marmi, affetto, ed atto:

  Che piú, se non parlar, può dar natura?

  2. More finely none has ever shap’d the breathing bronze;

  True is my song; thou see’st the living marble speak.

  No more the glorious olden age of Greece should boast

  The isle of Rhodes had need to

  hold its statues chain’d; Those bonds to guard this later master’s wondrous works

  Were better us’d.

  1. Piero based the relationships in his paintings on the laws of Euclidean geometry. The regular bodies were theoretically perfect forms which, it was thought, could provide the artist with certain, or precisely measurable, relationships through which art could reveal and reproduce the order of nature.

  2. Luca Pacioli.

  1. Bartolomeo Suardi.

  1. Luca Signorelli.

  1. This is hard on Luca Pacioli who is regarded as having edited rather than plagiarized Piero.

  1. Brother Angelic.

  1. He was sent for, in fact, by Eugene IV. Here, and elsewhere, the Papal palazzo is translated (anachronistically) as the Vatican.

  1. In praise of me, O Lord, be it not said

  That I did match Apelles, but that I

  My wages to thy people gave entire;

  For different are the deeds that count on earth

  From those in heaven.

  In that city was I, John, born

  That is the flower of Tuscany.

  1. Alberti was born in Genoa, to which his family had fled from political strife in Florence. His work on architecture – De Re Aedificatoria – was published in 1485; his work on painting – De Pictura – was published at Venice in the translation by Ludovico Domenichi, in 1547. His work on the ‘civ
il life’ was the Della Famiglia in four books, a dialogue on education, marriage, household management, and friendship. The two lines from the letter quoted by Vasari run: ‘I send this most wretched letter, to you who so cruelly scorn us.’

  1. In fact, Luca Fancelli.

  1. Filippino Lippi (1457/8–1504).

  1. Here in this place do I, Filippo, rest

  Enshrin’d in token of my art’s renown.

  All know the wondrous beauty of my skill;

  My touch gave life to lifeless paint, and long

  Deceiv’d the mind to think the forms would speak.

  Nature herself, as I reveal’d her, own’d

  In wonderment that I could match her arts.

  Beneath the lowly soil was I interr’d

  Ere this; but now Lorenzo Medici

  Hath laid me here within this marble tomb.

  1. Decameron, 5th day, novella 8.

  1. Botticelli died in 1510, aged sixty-five.

  1. This little picture warns the rulers of the earth

  To shun the tyranny of judgement false.

  Apelles gave its like to Egypt’s king;

  that king

  Was worthy of the gift, and it of him.

  1. This ‘bronze horse’ was the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which Michaelangelo subsequently had removed to the Capitol.

  1. The tomb of Michele di cione, and his Kin.

  Here lie the bones of Andrea Verrocchio, who died at Venice, 1488.

  1. In fact, under Francesco Squarcione.

  1. The figures ‘foreshortened from below upwards’ were painted di sotto in su - a technique first fully developed by Mantegna – to give the illusion of bodies floating in space over the head of the spectator.

  1. Who dost behold the statues bronze

  Of Mantegna, thou shalt know

  That verily this master ranks

  Apelles’ peer, if not yet more.

  1. Andrea del Verrocchio (see above), painter and goldsmith, and the chief sculptor in Florence after Donatello’s death.

  1. Virgil and Homer both have shown us Neptune guide

  His steeds amid the billows of the roaring main.

  These poets, though, have seen him but with mental gaze,

  Vinci with vision real; and ’tis truth to hail

  Vinci as victor.

  1. Leonardo probably went to Milan in 1482, when Ludovico was already in control of the state.

  1. Literally, ‘which by blowing into, he made fly through the air, but then when the wind (vento) ceased, they fell to the ground’. There has been considerable speculation as to what diese figures really were. More than likely, Leonardo simply flew some little kites.

  2. To virtù – possibly meaning ‘virtue’.

  1. Leonardo died aged sixty-seven.

  1. Da Vinci vanquished alone all others, he vanquished Phidias and Apelles, and all their victorious followers.

  1. The Bellini were three Venetian painters: Jacopo (c. 1400–70/1) and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.

  1. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi – the headquarters of the German trading community, with offices, warehouses, and living accommodation – was destroyed in 1505.

  1. The signet-office (il Piombo) provided a papal sinecure, that of Keeper of the Papal Seal, given to Sebastiano del Piombo in 1531.

  1. In fact, in the cathedral at Parma.

  1. The paintings are of Leda and Danaë.

  1. While still life’s spirit mov’d this painter’s earthly limbs

  The Graces Jove besought: ‘Dear Father, we implore

  That we be painted by no hand but his; this task

  To all but him forbid.’ Their plea won the assent

  Of high Olympus’ king, who thus did snatch the youth

  Upon a sudden to the stars above, that so

  From close at hand he might more finely render yet

  The Graces’ likeness, and uncloth’d their beauty see.

  1. Andrea Solari, brother of the sculptor Cristoforo.

  1. Pietro Perugino (c. 1445/50–1523).

  1. Bernardino Pintoricchio (c. 1454–1513) left as his chief works fresco cycles in the Borgia Apartments at the Vatican and in the Piccolomini library at Siena.

  1. Vasari’s account of Raphael’s work is very muddled. Very briefly: Raphael was working in the Stanza della Segnatura (part of the series of rooms that Julius was having decorated) by 1509. Here, the two chief frescoes are known as the School of Athens and the Disputation concerning the Blessed Sacrament. In the Stanza d’Elidoro the chief subjects are the Expulsion of Heliorus from the Temple,, the Liberation of St Peter, and the Miracle of the Mass at Bohena. The scenes in the Stanza dell’Incendio (containing the Fire in the Borgo) and the Sala di Constantino were mostly executed by Raphael’s assistants.

  1. Others may paint the sitter’s face, and catch its hues; Raphael has shown Cecilia’s face and very mind.

  1. To The Glory of God

  In memory of Raphael son of Giovanni Santi Urbino : The great painter and rival of the ancients : Whose almost-breathing likenesses if thou beholdest, thou shalt straightway see Nature and Art in league : Who by his deeds in painting and in architecture did swell the glory of the Sovereign Pontifia Julius II and Leo X : Who lived in goodness thirty-seven good years, and died on his birthday, April 6 1520.

  This is that Raphael, by whom in life

  Our mighty mother Nature fear’d defeat;

  And in whose death did fear herself to die.

  Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) was a cardinal, poet, and literary legislator.

  1. Because with physic skill the body torn

  He heal’d, and did Hippolytus recall

  From Styx’s waters, Epidaurus’ pride

  Himself was snatch’d to the Stygian stream;

  The master’s own death thus life’s ransom paid.

  So thou too, Raphael : thy wondrous skill

  Rome’s riven frame hath mended, and with fire

  And sword and years our city’s body rent

  Reviving ancient beauty hath restor’d.

  But thou didst rouse the Gods to jealousy

  And Death grew wroth, that in his law’s despite

  What Time’s slow march had cancell’d, now once more

  Thou should’st renew; so, hapless! thou dost fall

  In youth’s first flowering sever’d, and dost warn

  That we with all we own are pledg’d to Death.

  Baldesar Castiglione (1478–1529), author of The Book of the Courtier.

  1. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–94), a competent painter, chiefly in fresco, who ran a large family studio in Florence.

  2. Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo’s pupil, whose Life of Miclielangelo, closely supervised by Michelangelo himself, was published in 1553.

  1. Martin Schongauer (1453–91), a painter and engraver of Colmar.

  2. Giovanni di Bertoldo (c. 1420–91).

  1. Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528), a Florentine sculptor who worked in England, notably on the tomb of Henry VII.

  1. This is the crucifix (disputedly) discovered in Florence in 1963, carved in white poplar.

  1. Michelangelo went to Rome first in 1496. The Popes he served were Julius II (1503–13), Leo X (1513–21), Clement VII (1523-34), Paul III (1534–49), Julius III (1550–5), Paul IV (1555–9). and Pius IV (1559–65)

  2. This was Jean Villier de la Grolaie, abbot of Saint-Denis and cardinal of Santa Sabina.

  1. Cristoforo Solari.

  1. The verse was by Giovan Battista Strozzi il Vecchio, poet and madrigalist, and if very obscure. Roughly and literally : ‘Beauty and goodness, And grief and pity, alive in the dead marble. Do not, as you do, weep so loudly, Lest before time should awake from death, In spite of himself, Our Lord, and thy Spouse, son and father, Oh virgin, only spouse, daughter and mother.’

  2. Soderini was elected Gonfaloniere di justizia for life (in effect, head of the Florentine Republic) in 1502.

  1. A volcanic dust foun
d near Pozzuoli.