13: Florence and Vasari
Several contexts for Vasari and the Lives
- development of Tuscany under Cosimo I
- artists, architects, sculptors and their works in their society
- historical writing in the Renaissance
- Vasari’s own career
Artists and the Arts
- In Trade guilds until 1571
- Manual arts vs liberal arts
- Pliny Natural History
- Vitruvius
- Alberti
- Linear Perspective
- Creative Furor (Plato)
Michelangelo, Holy Family (Doni Tondo) 1506-8. Uffizi
an “art market”
- attention to individual style
- collecting
- interest in art on paper: trial drawings, prints
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Michelangelo: San Lorenzo, New Sacristy
Mannerism or Late Renaissance
Cosimo I Duke of Fl. 1537-69, GD of Tuscany 1569-74 (b. 1519)
Accademia Fiorentina 1541
Accademia del Disegno 1563
Company; Academy (Cosimo, Michelangelo as heads) San Lorenzo old Sacristy (one of several meeting places)
Writing a History of the visual arts
Antiquity: “History” studies public actions of the past (politics)
Pliny Natural History
Lives of famous men
Suetonius
Diogenes Laertius
Paolo Giovio
Giorgio Vasari (1511-74)
- From Arezzo; cousin of Luca Signorelli
- To Florence; Educated with Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici
- 1527 (Sack of Rome) to Arezzo
- 1529 travels, works in several cities
- 1532 Florence; leaves after death of Alessandro
- 1540’s worked in Rome
- 1550 married; first edition of Lives (finished 1547)
- 1555 Cosimo I’s chief artistic controller
Vasari, St Jerome (Art Institute of Chicago)
Giorgio Vasari (1511-74)
Lives of the Artists 1550; 1568
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Vincenzio Borghini: plans intellectual principles behind major projects.
3-part historical period:
antico, vecchio, moderno
maniera tedesca (Gothic)
Basis for evaluating style: accuracy– perspective, anatomy, shading, color