080022 SE SE: Vasari & his Co-Authors: Artist, Historiographer, Architect - and the Rise of the Mod. Art World (2021S)

‘All of art history is footnotes to Giorgio Vasari.’ With these words of praise for Giorgio Vasari Robert Williams was invoking a famous line from Bertrand Russell: ‘All European Philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.’
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent
Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors appeared in 1550 in Florence, where it was published by the official ducal printer to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. The Lives are not only the first book on the
history of art and architecture printed in the West but also the most influential western book on the history of art ever written – as well as being the most important source on the art and
artists of the Italian Renaissance.
As a painter Vasari created allegorical portraits of the Medici rulers and, with his fresco cycles of the history of the Medici and the history of Florence, a ‘grand narrative’ of the cultural history of Florence and Tuscany culminating in the Medici Grand Duke, Cosimo I (the
frescoes adorned the new apartments of the Medici family in what we now call the Palazzo Vecchio, the former town hall of Florence, and the great reception room of the same building, which Vasari modified according to Michelangelo’s specifications). He decorated his own houses with paintings about painting (‘meta-paintings’). At the same time, Vasari was an architect and a town planner who, looking back on an era that was coming to an end, shaped the city of
Florence as an ideal Renaissance city by erecting the Uffizi and redesigning the major Florentine churches in the Renaissance style as late as a hundred years after the pioneers of the Florentine
Early Renaissance. Vasari was heavily involved in the completion of Michelangelo’s major Florentine works after Michelangelo’s departure for Rome: the New Sacristy and the Laurentian
Library. He also built the world-famous Florentine bridge, the Ponte Vecchio. As a collector he assembled an extensive early collection of drawings in the form of a portable museum: his Libro
dei Disegni or album of drawings. As an ‘academician’ and cultural functionary he was heavily involved in the creation of the first art academy in Europe, the Accademia del Disegno in
Florence (est. 1563, its first honorary president was Michelangelo). As an author he not only formed the canon of Italian Renaissance art but also canonized a new genre of iconographical
image description – the explanation of complex visual content and symbols that could not be understood without ‘instructions for reading’ – and thus created the ‘iconological’ method of
interpretation. As an interlocutor and correspondent (c. 1000 letters to and from him survive) he was in contact with many of the famous scholars and artists of his time; Michelangelo, for
instance, wrote letters and dedicated poems to him. As a highly successful court artist and an
independent artist-entrepreneur who provided decorations for the emperor’s ceremonial entry to
Bologna and Florence, he recorded his income in a ledger which has been preserved. Along with
his autobiography – the first printed autobiography by an artist – a multitude of records and
letters collected by Vasari and his descendants make him one of the best documented artists of
the early modern era.
As an author, architect and artist, town planner, executor of Michelangelo’s unfinished Florentine
works, and designer of Michelangelo’s tomb, Vasari has influenced the early modern, the modern
and the contemporary art world. The first books on Netherlandish, Spanish and German art
history are effectively sequels to Vasari’s Lives. Vasari coined the concept of the divine artist, of
the artist as genius, albeit before the term genius came in use. Such an extraordinarily gifted, even
blessed artist was embodied for him in Raphael and Michelangelo, whose global fame he established. He defined the visual arts as the autonomous arti del disegno (arts of design and
drawing), a conception borrowed from a medieval Encyclopdia from his native Arezz