The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari by Cast David

Author:Cast, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

saying that it was not a good thing to stay in Venice, where no account was taken of design, nor did the painters of the city make any use of it, not to mention that those painters themselves were the reason that no attention was paid there to the labours of the arts; and he declared that it would be better to return to Rome, the true school of noble arts, where ability was recognized much more than in Venice.2

The inferiority of Venice has been noted, too, in Vasari’s criticism of painters who were seduced by the city’s commercial opportunities and luxuries, including Agnolo Gaddi and Antonello da Messina.3 Examples such as these from the Lives have colored our appreciation of Venetian art as working against Tuscan ideals outlined in the Lives.4

This analysis re-evaluates Vasari’s comments on Venice, his understanding of this city as a particular environment—natural, artistic, commercial, and political—and the role he assigns Venice in his Lives. While Florence and Rome were both centers of the new art, Venice takes on a role in the 1568 edition that Vasari, writing from Florence, celebrated and likely envied. We will first consider Vasari’s time in Venice in 1541 and 1542; that experience illuminated for him what it meant to be a foreigner welcomed in this extraordinary city newly appreciative of a classicizing style. Between that visit and the publication of the Lives in 1550, writers on art took up a debate contrasting the art of Venice with the maniera identified in the work of Michelangelo and his followers. We will examine what Vasari contributed to this debate in his account of the contrast between the colore of Venice and the disegno of Florence and Rome, solidifying in his work the supremacy of disegno and thus Florentine and Roman art. We will then observe interesting shifts in Vasari’s concerns between the 1550 and 1568 editions in his discussion of portraits in Venice. Vasari recognized the city’s particular contribution to the history of portraiture in both editions, focusing in 1550 on the parallels between ancient Roman and Venetian family portrait collections, a point repeated in 1568; he adds an important commentary on the significance of portrait painting to artist-courtiers, perhaps reflecting on his own status as an artist at court, and certainly acknowledging what he understood of the role of artists at court. Finally, we will examine what interested Vasari most about Venice as he revised his text for the 1568 edition: architecture and urban planning, concerns that occupied him continuously at the Medici court in the years after the first edition.

The mirror of the Lives offers us our clearest understanding of where Venice fits in the rivalries of Italian cities. In his Lives, Vasari offers the facts of his experiences in Venice as well as the biographies of artists active in the city. He also provides a fiction of the city of Venice, a city that in Vasari’s time actively developed and promoted its own myth as both history and destiny.

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