‘From the Vite or the Ritratti? Previuosly Unknown Portraits from Vasari’s Libro de’ disegni’, I Tatti Studies, XXI, 1, 2018, 105-36 (original) (raw)

Vasari and Portraiture: Function, Aesthetics and Propaganda

Journal of Art Historiography, 2023

This article examines how portraiture is presented in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550 and 1568). The Lives claims portraits are to remember the dead and instruct the living; to do this, they must be accurate copies of the sitter. Praising portraits as copies effectively endorses the often-promotional messages of the portraits themselves. However, the book praises some portraits as beautiful and miraculous works in neoplatonic terms. The idealism of neoplatonism is at odds with the requirement to have an accurate copy of the sitter and this apparent contradiction can be understood as a consequence of the unstated purpose of the Lives; to propagandise on behalf of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence. The portraits of the Medici and their associates are praised as both lifelike and exceptional, and thus readers are encouraged to believe that the sitters are actually exceptional.

Inventing Engraving in Vasari's Florence

Intellectual History Review, 2014

Scholars generally agree that printed images were first pulled from engraved plates during the first half of the fifteenth century, somewhere beyond the Alps in Northern Europe. 1 Undoubtedly, these stand-alone impressions were preceded by more rudimentary techniques of inking metalwork and stamping these on paper and fabric to record designs within workshops. Thus, while subject to slight variations, it is probably safe to say that the origins of engraving as a graphic technique in Europe are securely established. My essay provides no smoking gun to situate the earliest engravings any more precisely, nor can I reveal any profound contradictions or errors in the contours of this brief sketch.

Dominicus Lampsonius, Giorgio Vasari, and the Print as Work of Art

I Tatti Studies, 2022

TODAY, THE NETHERLANDISH HUMANIST Dominicus Lampsonius (fig. 1) is generally known for his two published texts on art: the biography of his friend and teacher Lambert Lombard, printed in Bruges in 1565, and the verse inscriptions he composed to accompany twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish painters, which appeared in 1572 under the title Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies. 1 During his lifetime, however, Lampsonius was celebrated as a polymath who studied classical languages at the University of Leuven, trained as a painter, and distinguished himself as Latin secretary to the English cardinal Reginald Pole as well as three successive prince-bishops of Liège. 2 He also became a central figure in a community of artists, poets, and publishers who began to address the history of Netherlandish art following the publication of Giorgio Vasari's seminal Lives of the Artists, first printed in Florence in 1550, which almost completely excluded northern artists from its history. 3 On October 30, 1564, Lampsonius wrote a letter to Vasari, initiating an epistolary exchange that lasted approximately half a year. None of Vasari's responses to

Portrait Painting in 16th century Europe

The essay aims to discuss and compare two notable portraits from the Mannerist period of Italian Renaissance, namely Titian’s Man with a Glove (c. 1520) and Francesco Salviati’s Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman (c. 1546). I will be doing so using Erwin Panofsky’s study of art objects, in which one starts off by directly describing the image at hand, followed by its iconographic motifs and meanings, and finally, the work’s iconology or significance to its milieu.

Giorgio Vasari's Fiery Putto: Artistic Armorial

Journal of Literature and Art Studies , 2021

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) as an artist and art historian of Italian Mannerism viewed himself as huomo buono et docto in buon letter (a fine and learned man). 1 In choosing to practice various arts such as writing treatises, collecting drawings, painting decorative cycles, designing buildings, and decorating facades, Vasari was viewed by humanists as a virtuoso. This Tuscan painter, architect, art collector, writer, and art historian is best known for his Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri (Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters and Sculptors of Italy, from Cimabue to the present time), which was first published in 1550, followed by an enlarged edition illustrated with woodcuts of artists' portraits in 1568. 2 In 1960, Einar Rud (1892-1980), a Danish biographer and a scholar of Vasari, characterized him as the first art historian. 3 By virtue of Rud's text, Vasari is known as "the first art historian"-in particular, of Italian art-since Pliny the Elder wrote Book 35 on the History of Art in Ancient times in the Natural History, published posthumously in 79 CE. 4 It is almost impossible to imagine the history of Italian art without Vasari, so fundamental is his Vite (Lives). This sixteenth-century Italian work is the first real and autonomous history of art because of its monumental encompassing of all of the following: (1) preambles for explanatory data on the function of the text; (2) integration

Vasari's Vite and Italian artists in sixteenth-century England

Journal of Art Historiography, 2013

Vasari's Vite provide valuable information about the way in which Italian art reached England, sometimes mentioning specific names of merchants and agents controlling the market. The migration of artists could in fact only occur with the backing of merchant-bankers who provided the financial means to undertake such costly and difficult trips, guaranteed a certain amount of work and in many cases even provided housing in their own company lodgings. The paper presents new archival evidence confirming the correctness of the leads offered in the Vite and argues that the movement of work and people was largely in the hands of a group of Florentine merchants with very close ties to the Medici in Florence and Rome.