The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics series) by Giorgio Vasari. There he also met Paolo Giovio, an important force for his Vite years later. And he told him. A rough workman, hearing of his fame, came to Giotto's workshop followed by one carrying his shield. A collection of programmes relating to painters and painting. So one day the king saying to him that he would make him the first man in Naples, Giotto answered, "And that is why I am lodged at the Porta Reale, that I may be the first man in Naples." Art in Tuscany | Giorgio Vasari | Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects | Giotto When Alessandro de’ Medici was murdered in 1537, Vasari was once again devoid of a princely patron. Preface to the Lives Giorgio Vasari, 1550. Giotto answered, 'Certainly, bring it down.' [1] Casa Vasari in Florence, Portraits of the Artists | 'In the second edition of “Lives”, which was published in Florence in 1568, Vasari had not only extensively revised and added to the book, but also preceded the individual lives with a woodcut showing a portrait of the respective artist. After its appearance several other biographies of artists appeared, most notably the life of Michelangelo by Asconio Condivi (q.v.). The outer side is full of columns, carvings, and groups, and on the frieze of the central door is a Jesus Christ with the twelve Apostles in half-relief, after the Greek manner. I have painted all your armour on the shield, and if there is anything else, tell me and I will add it.' Giotto said, 'Leave me to do it;' so he went away. Truly this work was vast, of great cost, and difficult to execute, and above all the vaulting of the tribune, made in the shape of a pear and covered without with lead. There was a helmet, a gorget, a pair of iron gloves, a cuirass, and cuisses, a sword, dagger, and lancc. Lactantius Firmianus, by way of fable, attributes it to Prometheus, who, in the manner of Almighty God, shaped man's image out of mud; and from him, he declares, the art of statuary came. Many years after, when the Christians were persecuted under Julian the Apostate, there was erected on the Cœlian Mount a church to S. John and S. Paul, the martyrs, in a manner so much worse than those named above, that it is seen clearly that the art was at that time little less than wholly lost.
But it is now time to come to the Life of Giovanni Cimabue, and even as he gave the first beginning to the new method of drawing and painting, so it is just and expedient that he should give it to the Lives, in which I will do my utmost to observe, the most that I can, the order of their manners rather than that of time.
And so all that the Pontiffs had not destroyed (and above all S. Gregory, who is said to have decreed banishment against all the remainder of the statues and of the spoils of the buildings) came finally, at the hands of that most rascally Greek, to an evil end; in a manner that, there being no trace or sign to be found of anything that was in any way good, the men who came after, although rude and boorish, and in particular in their pictures and sculptures, yet, incited by nature and refined by the air, set themselves to work, not according to the rules of the aforesaid arts, which they did not know, but according to the quality of their own intelligence. And if it had not been that the sculptures and pictures presented, to the eyes of those who were born from day to day, those who had been thereby honoured to the end that they might have eternal life, there would soon have been lost the memory of both; whereas some of them survived in the images and in the inscriptions placed in private houses, as well as in public buildings, namely, in the amphitheatres, the theatres, the baths, the aqueducts, the temples, the obelisks, the colossi, the pyramids, the arches, the reservoirs, the public treasuries, and finally, in the very tombs, whereof a great part was destroyed by a barbarous and savage race who had nothing in them of man but the shape and the name. (2). Nor can[Pg xlvii] it be believed that this came from anything else but the absence of better architects in that age, seeing that the said church (as it has been possible to see in our own day), which is octagonal and constructed from the spoils of the Theatre, the Colosseum and other edifices that had been standing in Arezzo before it was converted to the faith of Christ, was built without thought of economy and at the greatest cost, and adorned with columns of granite, of porphyry, and of many-coloured marbles, which had belonged to the said buildings. Wherefore there came to arise new architects, who brought from their barbarous races the method of that manner of buildings that are called by us to-day German; and they made some that are rather a source of laughter for us moderns than creditable to them, until better craftsmen afterwards found a better style, in some measure similar to the good style of the ancients, even as that manner may be seen throughout all Italy in the old churches (but not the ancient), which were built by them, such as a palace of Theodoric, King of Italy, in Ravenna, and one in Pavia, and another in Modena; all in a barbarous manner, and rather rich and vast than well-conceived or of good architecture. This episode is related to
Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) is the Plutarch of Renaissance Italy.
Beginning with the oldest and most important, I shall speak first of Agnolo called Bronzino, a Florentine painter truly most rare and worthy of all praise. We learn that the painter Piero di Cosimo was scared of the sound of bells, and witness Donatello shouting at his statues. The same could be said of S. Croce in Gierusalemme, which Constantine erected at the entreaty of his mother Helena, of S. Lorenzo without the walls of Rome, and of S. Agnesa, built by him at the request of Constantia, his daughter. In 155o he published his volume "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects" — an exhaustive (and imaginative) record of the artists of his day, … The people of Lucca, about the same time—that is, in the year 1061—as rivals of the people of Pisa, began the Church of S. Martino in Lucca from the design of certain disciples of Buschetto, there being then no other architects in Tuscany. A developmental period (augumento) was ultimately succeeded by the age of perfection (perfezione)--coincidentally Vasari’s own time and that of Michelangelo. When Vasari wrote his lives he was concerned mainly with Florentine artists. Few artists that Vasari criticised have been comprehensively rehabilitated and Vasari's semi-divine trio of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo are still seen as the apotheosis of artistic perfection. At the same time painting, which was little less than wholly spent, may be seen to have begun to win back something, as the mosaic shows that was made in the principal chapel[5] of the said Church of S. Miniato. The work is divided into a preface (proemio), a discussion of the various media, and then three sections devoted to artist biographies arranged chronologically.
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