THE RENAISSANCE IN EUROPE
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF THE RENAISSANCE
VASARI AND THE REBIRTH OF THE VISUAL ARTS
SIGNIFICANCE
 According to Wallace Ferguson, ‘…it was Vasari who gave to the new age
of art the name it still bears – the rebirth, la rinascita – though he himself
applied the term more specifically to its beginnings… Vasari created for
the first time a conception of Renaissance art as an organic whole,
developing by clearly marked stages…’ [Wallace K. Ferguson, The
Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1948; Toronto,
2006), p. 65]
 In the view of Charles Hope, the Lives are ‘…the most influential book
about the history of art ever written… inventing the idea of the
Renaissance and … dividing the history of art into a sequence of distinct
periods… the second and third prefaces… are probably the most famous
texts in the entire history of art’ [Charles Hope, ‘Can You Trust Vasari?’
The New York Review of Books 42/15 (October 5, 1995)]
QUESTIONS
 Who was Vasari?
 What are the Lives and who wrote them?
 How is the renaissance of the visual arts portrayed in the Lives?
WHO WAS VASARI?
Arezzo
Luca Signorelli
Andrea del Sarto
Rosso Fiorentino
Jacopo Pontormo
Michelangelo
Raphael
Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence
Uffizi.
Cosimo I
Accademia del Disegno
WHAT ARE THE LIVES AND WHO WROTE THEM?
The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors from
Cimabue until Our Own Times (1550)
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568)
‘The Lives are a very personal projection of stylistic and social ideals. Central
Italian artists are predominant, and artists from other regions are appraised
using standards based on the style prevalent in Rome in the 1530s and 1540s
when Vasari came to artistic maturity’. [Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art
and History by Patricia Lee Rubin (New Haven, 1995), p. 105]
Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio
Leonardo Bruni, Machiavelli, and Paolo Giovio
Eulogies of Famous Men of Letters (1546)
‘The artist was able to give shape to the concerns of an entire society and to a
tradition of `art-historical' writing which, though long-established, had been
unable to transform itself into a more complex literary form. Yet on the very last
page of the book Vasari is somewhat mythologised as 'the Author', whose
passion and love created the greatest invention of his life.’ [Alessandro Nova,
‘Review of Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History in The Burlington
Magazine 137/112 (November 1995), p. 759]
Pierfrancesco Giambullari
HOW IS THE RENAISSANCE OF THE VISUAL ARTS PORTRAYED IN THE
LIVES?
Giotto
Cimabue
Filippo Brunelleschi
Francesco di Giorgio
Urbino
Lorenzo Ghiberti
Donatello
Masaccio
Leonardo da Vinci
Giorgione da Castelfranco
Raphael of Urbino
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Santa Croce