A Preliminary Inventory of the Vasari Papers in the Beinecke Library

Abstract

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently acquired a portion of the private archive of Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance painter, architect, and author of Le vite de' piu' eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori. The Vasari papers, which came to the Beinecke as part of the library's acquisition of the archive of the Spinelli family, had been housed along with the Spinelli archive in the Palazzo Spinelli in Florence since 1687, when Senatore Buonsignore Spinelli served as executor of the estate of Giorgio's last descendant. For more than three centuries after the death of Giorgio, the Vasari papers remained completely unknown to scholars; they were rediscovered in 1908 by Giovanni Poggi during a visit to the Palazzo Spinelli. Count Luciano Rasponi-Spinelli, the family heir then residing in the Spinelli palace, sold the right to publish the Vasari documents to Professor Karl Frey of the University of Berlin. The research of Poggi and Frey on the documents in the Vasari archive inaugurated a new era of scholarly work on Vasari. Frey pursued his studies until his death, and his work was continued by his son, who published the first volume of Vasari's correspondence in 1923.1 Since Karl Frey's exclusive publication rights expired with his death, Count Rasponi-Spinelli donated the Vasari papers to the Comune di Arezzo in 1925; they are now kept in the Casa Vasari, the former residence of the family's most illustrious member. It has been assumed that Count Rasponi-Spinelli gave all of the surviving Vasari papers to the museum in Arezzo, but in fact a small portion of them remained in the Spinelli family archive in Florence. The Spinelli archive was in considerable disarray at the time Poggi and Frey were studying it, and the documents that remained in the Spinelli archive were probably unknown to them: neither Poggi nor Frey mentions any of the Vasari documents now in the Beinecke Library. An eighteenth-century inventory of all the documents in the Spinelli family archive assigned to the Vasari papers the volume (filza) numbers 34 through 66. The volumes now in Arezzo comprise items 36 through 65 in the old Spinelli catalogue. Volumes 34, 35, and 66 stayed in the Spinelli archive and are now in the Beinecke Library. It seems most likely that this was the result of an accident (i.e., that the Spinelli archive was in such disorder that these volumes simply could not be located), but Volumes 34 and 66 do contain material related to Buonsignore Spinelli's role as executor of the Vasari estate, suggesting that these volumes may have been intentionally retained by the Spinelli as documents of their own family history.2 The volumes now in Arezzo were described in a catalogue published in 1938 by Alessandro del Vita, Conservatore of the Casa Vasari.3 We present here a brief inventory of the three volumes now in the Beinecke Library. This inventory list supplements Del Vita's, providing a complete account of the contents of the Vasari family archive for the first time.4 Since an inventory list can hardly suggest the potential interest of the new material, it seems worthwhile here to call attention to a few of the highlights, such as the final testament and codicils of Giorgio Vasari (filza 34, filzetta 17); a catalogue of the paintings and works of art in the Vasari family's possession (filza 34, filzetta 6); documents related to Giorgio's work on the cupola of S. Maria del Fiore (filza 34, filzetta 33; Fig. 1); a running account, in Giorgio's hand, of all the paintings he produced between 1553 and 1566, to whom they were sold, and the price paid for each (filza 66, filzetta 1); and Giorgio's accounts of the payments he received for his work on the Palazzo Vecchio and on the Uffizi (filza 66, filzetta 2). Giorgio was not only an artist but also a collector of art works, and the catalogue of his collection may illuminate aspects of both his painting and his writing. For instance, the influence of Albrecht Diirer on Vasari has been much