| Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects | |
|---|---|
Title page of the 1568 edition of the Vite |
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| Author(s) | Giorgio Vasari |
| Original title | Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori |
| Translator | E.L. Seeley |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Subject(s) | Artist biographies |
| Publisher | Torrentino (1550), Giunti (1568) |
| Publication date | 1550 (enlarged 1568) |
| Published in English |
1908 |
| Pages | 369 (1550), 686 (1568) |
The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times, or Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri, as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art",[1] "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art"[2], and "one of the founding texts in art history".[3] The title is often abridged to the Vite or the Lives.
Contents |
As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari's work was first published in 1550 by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence,[4] and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).
The work has a consistent and notorious favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored.[3][5] Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view. John Symonds claimed in 1899 that "It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions.", while acknowledging that despite these shortcomings, it is one of the basic sources for information on the Renaissance in Italy.[6]
Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, although likely inventions. Others are generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and the immediately preceding one. Modern criticism—with all the new materials opened up by research—has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions.[3] The work is widely considered a classic even today, though it is widely agreed that it must be supplemented by modern critical research.
Vasari includes a 42 page sketch of his own biography at the end of his Vite, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati.[3]
Vasari's Vite has been described as "by far the most influential single text for the history of Renaissance art"[7] and "the most important work of Renaissance biography of artists".[1] Its influence is situated mainly in three domains: as an example for contemporary and later biographers and art historians, as a defining factor in the view on the Renaissance and the role of Florence and Rome in it, and as a major source of information on the lives and works of early Italian artists.
The Vite have been translated wholly or partially into many languages, including English, Dutch, German, Spanish and French.
The Vite formed a model for encyclopedias of artist biographies. Different 17th century translators became artist biographers in their own country of origin and were often called the Vasari of their country. Karel Van Mander was probably the first Vasarian author with his Painting book (Het Schilderboeck, 1604), which encompassed not only the first Dutch translation of Vasari, but also the first Dutch translation of Ovid and was accompanied by a list of Italian painters who appeared on the scene after Vasari, and the first comprehensive list of biographies of painters from the Low Countries.[1] Similarly, Joachim von Sandrart, author of Deutsche Akademie (1675), became known as the "German Vasari".[8] In England, Aglionby's Painting Illustrated from 1685 was largely based on Vasari as well.[1]
The Vite is also important as the basis for discussions on the development of style,[9] It influenced the view art historians had of the Early Renaissance for a long time, placing too much emphasis on the achievements of Florentian and Roman artists while ignoring those of the rest of Italy and certainly the artists from the rest of Europe.[10]
Finally, it has also been for centuries the most important source of information on Early Renaissance Italian (and especially Tuscan) painters and the attribution of their paintings. In 1899, an author like John Addington Symonds used the Vite as one of his basic sources for the description of artists in his 7 books on Renaissance in Italy.[11], and nowadays it is still, despite its obvious biases and shortcomings, the basis for the biography of many artists like Leonardo da Vinci.[12]
The Vite contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names, which are sometimes used in different ways. The following list respects the order of the book, as divided into its three parts. The book starts with a dedication to Cosimo I de' Medici and a preface, and then starts with technical and background texts about architecture, sculpture, and painting. A second preface follows, introducing the actual "Vite" in parts 2 to 5. What follows is the complete list from the second (1568) edition. In a few cases, different very short biographies were given in one section.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.