VASARI, GIORGIO (1511–1574)

VASARI, GIORGIO (1511–1574), Italian biographer, painter, and architect. Born in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, Giorgio Vasari was brought in his early years to Florence, where he eventually became a prolific painter and highly accomplished architect. As an artist he is best known for his extensive historical and allegorical fresco decorations in the Palazzo Vecchio, made to celebrate the ruler of Florence, Duke Cosimo de' Medici. As an architect his most celebrated building is the Uffizi, the government "offices" built for his Medici patron.

Vasari's art and architecture are eclipsed, however, by his work as a writer. His monumental Lives (commonly known as Lives of the Artists), was first published in Florence in 1550 and was reprinted in a much revised and amplified version in 1568. Composed as a series of biographies, Vasari's book is a history of the progress of art, after its "rebirth," from Cimabue to the perfection of Michelangelo. Considered to be the first "history of art" as such, the Lives powerfully shaped the emergence of art history as a scholarly discipline in the modern era. Vasari's book is also a rich source of information about Renaissance artists and the world in which they worked. It is a valuable font concerning the theory, practice, criticism, and techniques of art.

Given the vast amount of attention Vasari's writing has received, what is still underestimated at this late date is the status of Vasari's book as an enduring masterpiece of imaginative literature and of historical art. Literary scholars have been insufficiently attentive to Vasari's relations to Homer, Ovid, and Virgil, to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio, to Politian, Marsilio Ficino, and Ludovico Ariosto, to Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, and Pietro Aretino, and art historians are totally indifferent, if not hostile, to the literary virtues of the Lives.

Writing before the modern distinction between scientific history and historical fiction, Vasari produced a book that combined both—fables and novelle on the one hand and "factual documents," as we might call them, on the other. Although scholars have become increasingly attentive to the fictive character of the Lives, they have remained remarkably insensitive to the virtues of such fiction. Sometimes they still ignore or refuse to acknowledge the presence of fiction in Vasari's book, as when, for example, they treat his fable of Leonardo's fabulous buckler or his tale of Michelangelo's smiling faun made in the Medici garden as true stories, as documentation of what really happened. What is lost here is an adequate critical appreciation of Vasari's art, the poetic art and inventiveness of these and other stories.

The blind reading of Vasari, which talks around the fiction of his book or refers to it only as "poetic embellishment" when it is far more than that, is based on the misguided belief that history is an accumulation of facts when it is, in fact, shaped or formed, hence "fictive" in the root sense of the word. Fiction in Vasari is inevitably written in the service of the historical truth. Vasari reports, for example, that Piero di Cosimo was a "wild man," a fiction that is true to the character of the artist's primitive subjects, which are the inventions of a highly cultivated artist. The power of Vasari's fiction is so great that even modern scientific art historians have imagined him as a kind of caveman. Although Piero becomes a fictional character in the pages of Vasari, he is obviously not an invented character. Rather, he is a real person whose life is poetically imagined.

The poetry of Vasari endures in the modern fable of art, in Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, the tale of a painter whose inability to complete a masterpiece echoes Vasari's portrayal of Leonardo's unfinished work. Vasari is alive in Robert Browning's poems on Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, and in George Eliot's portrayal of Piero di Cosimo in Romola. The extent of Vasari's influence on the modern imagination is far greater than the provincial historiography of art history allows. Vasari's book is a classic of world literature in which the mythologized Piero di Cosimo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo are characters of historical fiction who take their place as the subjects of history and the modern novel alike. Vasari often appropriated materials from other writers, far more than is generally realized; but, in the end, he was the superintending intelligence responsible for the making of a great literary and historical masterpiece, which will forever remain "Vasari's Lives."

VASARI, GIORGIO (1511–1574)

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