Weekly Art History Lesson! (#2)
Giorgio Vasari, Italian Mannerist painter, who is better known for his biographies of artists than his own paintings now, despite his popularity during his lifetime.
An image of
Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects - commonly referred to as
The Lives), Vasari's book which started the documentation of artists and their work - and filled with anecdotes and amusing gossip about the lives of the artists that he wrote about.
Giorgio Vasari (1511 - 1574) was born in Arezzo, Tuscany. He became a student of the arts, being apprenticed to a skilled painter of stained glass (Guglielmo da Marsiglia) at an early age. Later, he would become a friend of the artist Michelangelo, whose work would become an influence on paintings by Vasari. This friendship began Vasari's interest in the lives of artists in various areas, though most notably painters and sculptors.
His
Lives showed the beginning of the tradition of writing in a biographical and encyclopedic that is still common in art history today, although he lacked much of the objectivity and date-placing that is common today. Many art historians only consider his work valid in its own right when supplemented with later scholarly works that detail the exact dates of artists and works mentioned. Still, he is credited with being the first person to use the term "Renaissance" in print (though it was a term in use previously to describe the art movement that was being written about), and his
Lives was published in two editions (1550 and 1568), the second after he left his home in Florence for a trip to Rome, in which he included information on several Roman artists (most notably Titian) that were absent in the Florentine-centric first edition. This bias towards Florentine art is dramatic and ever-present in his writing, and he credits many artists from Florence with much of the pivotal and important developments in the art world in his time.
Vasari is known as a Mannerist painter in his own work, though history has largely overlooked a fair amount of his actual artistic work, and focused more on his writing. Mannerism is an era of painting closely placed near the High Renaissance and Baroque periods, and is most well known for its elongated figures and use of intense color to create dynamic scenes, usually of people in intense group situations.
A Vasari fresco painting inside of the Duomo of Florence - it was left unfinished by Vasari himself, however, and was later completed by Federico Zuccari and Giovanni Balducci.
Vasari is also known for his success as an architect, and is best known for his design of the loggia (columned outdoor corridor) of the Palazzo degli Uffizi, as well as the passage connecting the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti in this area of his work. These architectural features exhibited a strong knack for city planning, creating public-friendly plazas and spaces around the buildings, and creating gorgeous facades that exist to this day.
While history may not have remembered Vasari the artist as much as Vasari the author and architect, his accomplishments still live on in his native Florence today - he was one of the founders of the Accademia del Disegno (now the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze) - the Florence Academy of Fine Arts - which houses Michelangelo's
David and still functions as a school for developing artists wishing to surround themselves with the work of the old masters today.
You can learn more about Vasari on Wikipedia
here, the
Lives here, and more about the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
here.
