Victims & Villains in Vasari's Lives

by Andrew T. Ladis

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari's literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari's villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer's foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.

Approaching Lives on Vasari's terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari's motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

159 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2008

Reviews

[Andrea Ole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I start reading what is regarded as the first art history book, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568), a large, multi-volume work devoted to Renaissance artists from the late thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, I wanted to become more familiar with its author and subject matter.

Andrew Ladis describes how Vasari's approach blends fiction with fact by superimposing a pattern of hero and villain on artists he pairs together. Thus Michelangelo is contrasted against Baccio Bandellini, a contemporary of Michangelo, who was also a great sculptor, as the book cover image attests, but Bandellini is also characterized by Vasari as an artist full of so much envy, arrogance, dishonesty that it not only ruins his character, but also seeps into and vitites the quality of his artwork.

Incidentally, we learn that Vasari held off including Bandellini in the first edition of his Lives published in 1550, because Bandellini was still alive and would likely have taken some sort of action against him.

Ladis's book is a good introduction to reading Vasari's Lives alerting a modern reader to how fast and loose art historians treated facts at a time before standards of objective scholarship were in force and expected. This art history book also thoroughly references the artworks it mentions in photos, so the reader need not rush to the internet to check photos, unless they want to see them in color.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good review of Vasari. The author’s humor shows through his writing, which I truly enjoyed. Also, the pictures are great!