Giorgio Vasari

68 GIORGIO VASARI (1511-1574)

The first art historian

An eclectic and prolific artist, Giorgio Vasari is best known as the world’s first art historian. Born in Arezzo on 30 July 1511, into a family of modest cloth merchants, the young Vasari attended workshops of several artists in the city, from whom he learned notions of painting and architecture and acquired a humanistic education.

He traveled to Florence to study under Andrea del Sarto, and came in contact with Cardinal Silvio Passerini, a great patron who recommended him to the powerful Medici family. However, his promising career was abruptly interrupted upon the death of his father in 1527. Merely 16 years old, Vassari took on the role of family provider, for his mother and four younger brothers. It was a difficult period for Vasari who, in order to make a living, devoted himself entirely to painting and worked tirelessly to produce altarpieces for the churches of Arezzo and the surrounding area. With the money he earned, he was able to build a beautiful house in Arezzo (now the Vasari Museum). Unhappily though, he suffered from a deep melancholy and went to reside in a hermitage in nearby Camaldoli, painting for the monks while searching for serenity in nature. In 1538, having secured financial stability for his family, and with his health restored, Vasari could now left modest Arezzo in search of more ambitious projects.

Return to Medici’s Florence

For the next 15 years Vasari traveled throughout Italy and gained a reputation as a painter while expanding his knowledge

THE HOLY FAMILY WITH THE INFANT, SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST, AND SAINT ELIZABETH

from the circle of Giorgio Vasari, oil on panel, 16th century

70 in architecture. In 1554, at the insistence of Cosimo I de’

Medici, Duke of Florence, Vasari returned to Florence as an artist and architect in the service of the Medici court.

Cosimo wanted to give Florence the dignity of a ducal seat and commissioned important projects to Vasari, including the restructuring of the ancient Palazzo dei Priori, now known as the Palazzo della Signoria or Palazzo Vecchio, which was transformed from an austere castle into a sumptuous government building.

It is to Giorgio Vasari and his large group of collaborators artists, craftsmen and laborers, that we owe the current appearance of the Great Hall, better known as the Salone dei Cinquecento. A room of enormous dimensions, it was renovated at the behest of Cosimo I de’ Medici with the intent to represent the most important episodes in Florentine history and to celebrate the Medici power over the Duchy of Tuscany. It is still the venue of the most important institutional events of the city today. Vasari then undertook the construction of the Uffizi, adjacent to the palace, to house the administrative offices. The Uffizi today is among the most renowned and respected art galleries in the world.

His final construction was the Vasari Corridor, an elevated pathway to run above the Ponte Vecchio connecting the Palazzo Vecchio, the political and administrative center, with the Palazzo Pitti, across the Arno River, where the dukes of Florence were building the new Royal Palace. Vasari completed the Vasari Corridor in only six months, in time for the 1565 wedding of the Medici heir Francesco and Joanna of Austria, daughter of Ferdinand I of Habsburg, the Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1594, by order of the new Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, who detested the noises and smells of the butchers’ stores on the Ponte Vecchio, the butcheries were replaced by the numerous jewelry shops which remain to this day.

Le Vite (“The Lives”)

In 1550, Vasari published the first edition of the Le Vite de’ Più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, e Architettori (“Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects”), one of the first and fundamental texts in Italian art history. Through pages rich in facts, anecdotes and background, the reader can not only retrace the lives of great and universally known artists, but also of more obscure and often forgotten painters. Vasari contextualized art works that we have come to know, by placing them in the history and culture of their time. The Lives is a fundamental work, having gathered in a systematic way a collection of biographies of artists, from Cimabue to Vasari’s own contemporaries whom he considered “most excellent.” Vasari wrote of the critical fortune (or, as it may have been, the critical misfortune) of many artists. The Lives is also important because with this work Vasari contributed in part to form a precise vision of the history of art, of the rebirth of the arts after centuries of decadence of ancient art, and according to which, art reached its maximum height and fulfillment with the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the only contemporary artist mentioned in the book’s second edition in 1568.

It was Vasari’s work as an art historian that left a lasting cultural impact and influenced generations of art historians despite his great achievements in painting and architecture. A term he used to describe Giotto’s painting, “rinascita,” meaning “rebirth,” was later picked up by the French historian Jules Michelet to apply to the iconic artistic and cultural period that we know today as “the Renaissance.”