The inventor of the Renaissance

Four and a half centuries after his death, we still owe our understanding of art’s greatest period to Giorgio Vasari.

Photo by Carlo Bollo / Alamy

The year 1550 was one of the most significant in the history of art. Not because of the appearance of any great work of painting or sculpture but because of a book. Giorgio Vasari’s Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) – a collection of short biographies laced with anecdotes – is not only an indispensable source of information about the greatest names of the Renaissance but also the work that established a conception of art’s most revered period that still persists. Indeed, it was Vasari’s book that introduced the word rinascita – rebirth or renaissance – into cultural consciousness.

The Lives of the Artists was important for other reasons too. It was Vasari who instituted what might be termed a Whig theory of art history in which painting, sculpture and architecture progressed out of the darkness of Gothic (which he thought barbaric) and the hierarchical formality of Greek (that is Byzantine) art and into the light. Art, he said, “like the human body, is born, grows, ages and dies” and it had degenerated into “extreme ruin” with the fall of Rome. It was Italian, and specifically Tuscan, artists who brought it back to life.

The Lives, some 200 of them of varying lengths, mapped out a 300-year trajectory beginning with Cimabue (circa 1240-1302) and ending with his own partial biography. Vasari’s real points of focus, however, were those men (though there are four women, Plautilla Nelli, Lucrezia Quistelli, Properzia de’ Rossi and Sofonisba Anguissola) who changed things, such as Giotto, who was the first to raise art “to the point where it could be called good”, and Michelangelo, who brought it to “perfection”.

The book also confirmed the idea that was already developing in the late-15th and early-16th centuries that artists were not mere craftsmen but possessed of gifts beyond simple manual facility. Although diligence was a prerequisite, most artists, in Vasari’s view, were special beings, as touched with inspiration and as worthy of adulation as poets and philosophers. The Lives is often far from accurate but mixes the factual and apocryphal to bolster this image of his chosen figures as a breed apart.

From the idea of artists being in competition – as were his exemplars, the hallowed triumvirate of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo – and the notion of art as a story of progression to the importance of drawings as individual works in their own right, Vasari set out a framework for thinking and writing about art and artists that has remained prevalent to this day.

The man responsible for all this died 450 years ago and was not even primarily a writer. Vasari (1511-1574) was instead the most successful Italian artist and architect of the mid 16th-century, although his achievements in those fields have been comprehensively overshadowed by his book. Vasari could be waspish about his peers but he was clear-sighted as to his own merits: “If my ability had been equal to my desires, I would have become a reasonable painter.”

In fact he was a more than reasonable painter in the muscle-bound Mannerist style, although not an artist of the first rank: he could be relied on for yardage rather than quality. Nevertheless he – and a team of assistants – filled some of the grandest spaces in Italy with paintings. He was responsible for the decorations on the cupola of Florence’s cathedral; the vast Hall of the Five Hundred – the seat of government – in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence; the echoing Sala Regia that separates the Sistine Chapel from the Pope’s private chapel in the Vatican; and numerous other sites from Venice and Naples to Pisa and Arezzo. Meanwhile, his most significant architectural work was the Uffizi, designed as the bureaucratic hub from which the Medici, his masters, ruled the city.

Despite this indefatigability, Vasari managed to collect verbal testimony, source dates, visit works of art around Italy, and send innumerable letters requesting information to produce a book some 400 pages in length. Even then he was not satisfied: the first volume of the Lives left out various artists of note, especially Titian, Giorgione and the Venetian school, and in 1568 he brought out an expanded three-volume edition that ran to nearly 800 pages.

What qualified Vasari to undertake such a task is that he knew many of the artists himself. Although he was born in Arezzo, Tuscany to a family of potters, his great uncle was the painter Luca Signorelli, who encouraged the boy in his pursuit of art: “Learn, little kinsman.” He was already schooled enough in Latin to be able quote chunks of the Aeneid to a visiting cardinal who subsequently sent him to join the Medici household in Florence. His formal education continued in the classroom alongside two Medici sons, and while there he probably became familiar with texts such as Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives, that would form the model for his own Lives.

Artistically, he was trained in the workshop of Michelangelo himself and rapidly became a favourite. When Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by the Medici Pope Clement VII, Vasari was transferred to the workshop of Andrea del Sarto.

This Florentine teaching lay behind another of the themes of the Lives; the supremacy of disegno over colore. The terms mean more than design and colour but rather are aesthetic conceptions. The former, which was the norm in Tuscany, stipulated that good art was based on drawing, composition and rationality – an idea, invenzione, would be brought to fruition through the accretion of preparatory sketches from statues or live models “to see how the whole goes together”. The latter, a Venetian speciality, stated that precedence should be given to expressive colour, painterliness and the observation of nature. Even Titian, the greatest of the Venetians, was, thought Vasari, hampered by the lack of disegno. He quoted Michelangelo’s opinion that “if this man had been in any way assisted by art and design, as he is by nature, and above all in counterfeiting the life, no one could do more or work better, for he has a fine spirit and a very beautiful and lively manner”.

As Vasari rose to eminence, he determined to preserve his artistic heritage and in 1563 he was one of the founders of the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, a school dedicated to preserving the primacy of disegno in art.

Vasari’s autobiographical essay in the Lives is more revealing of his travels, the innumerable works he painted and the patrons he worked for than of his own personality. He was, by all accounts, small in stature, borderline ugly (as was his hero Michelangelo) and afflicted with eczema. The brilliant but bombastic sculptor Benvenuto Cellini dismissed him as “Giorgetto Vassellario”, little George the vassal, and related a tale of the young Vasari sharing a bed with another apprentice, named Manno, and scratching himself so hard in his sleep that he drew blood. However, although he “thought he was scratching himself, he had taken the skin off one of Manno’s legs with his dirty hands, the nails of which he never cut”.

An unprepossessing appearance did not hold Vasari back. He worked for, among others, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the Del Monte Pope Julius III, and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici – to whom he dedicated the Lives. Cosimo appointed him his artistic adviser and at 25 he was put in charge of the artistic preparations for the visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Florence. When jealous local artists refused to help, he simply imported artists from outside the city. In 1564, in a final act of obeisance, he stage-managed Michelangelo’s funeral and designed his tomb in Santa Croce in Florence.

Vasari’s letters reveal that Del Monte was responsible for more than simply commissions. The artist had had a long-standing relationship with an Arezzo woman named Maddalena Bacci and fathered two daughters with her. When she died of the plague, Del Monte pressed him to marry Maddalena’s younger sister Niccolosa and Vasari decided “under pressure from him, to do something I hadn’t wanted to do up to now, that is to take a wife”.

He also claimed that with his friend Francesco Salviati he rescued the left arm of Michelangelo’s statue of David which had been snapped off by a hurled bench during the anti-Medici riots in 1527. As with Del Monte’s marital cajoling, the story pushes at credulity and has a picaresque flavour that is typical of the details he revealed about others.

It is Vasari, for example, who claimed that Piero di Cosimo lived entirely on eggs, cooked in batches of 50 in the water he used to prepare glue. He was the first to relate that Giotto sent a drawing of a perfect circle made without moving his arm to Pope Benedict IX to demonstrate his skill. He recounted how the commission to design the dome of Florence’s cathedral was decided when Filippo Brunelleschi suggested “that whosoever could make an egg stand upright on a flat piece of marble should build the cupola, since thus each man’s intellect would be discerned”. His rivals all failed but he succeeded by “giving one end of it a blow on the flat piece of marble”, allowing it to stand. And it was Vasari who claimed that Leonardo’s teacher Andrea del Verrocchio gave up painting after seeing his pupil, “although he was but a lad”, paint an angel so perfect he knew he could not compete.

These accounts, and numerous others, have entered art historical lore despite being more fable than reportage. Vasari made numerous less poetic errors of fact too, including the oft repeated claim that it was the Van Eyck brothers who invented oil painting. But then he will include a detail that has both the smack of truth and signifies something revealing about its subject, such as his revelation that the elderly Michelangelo “wore buskins of dogskin on the legs, next to the skin, constantly for whole months together, so that afterwards, when he sought to take them off, on drawing them off the skin often came away with them”, a revolting particularity that hardly redounds to the credit of his idol.

For all its faults – no Life for eminent northerners such as Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch, for example, or for Jan van Eyck or Dürer, despite them meriting warm mentions in passing in the biographies of Italian artists – Vasari’s model was quickly followed by the likes of Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Giovanni Baglione in Italy, Karel van Mander and Arnold Houbraken in the Low Countries, and Joachim von Sandrart in the German lands.

The sour Cellini commented: “If God had extended Vasari’s life, he would have painted the whole world.” He didn’t manage that but in the Lives he did depict a whole world and, four and half centuries after his death, the Renaissance as it is seen today is still the one Vasari bequeathed us.