Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cave: Vasari’s Lives and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship

Abstract

My topic is the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Lives was first published in Florence in 1550 and reprinted eighteen years later in a greatly expanded version. Vasari took an idea common in his time, the idea of the renaissance or rebirth — la rinascita — of art, and made it the basis of a historical scheme modeled in part on the human life cycle.1 He argued that classical and modern art had each gone through a threestage career of improvement. Classical art and culture were destroyed by the combined forces of barbarian invasion and Christian zeal. But after almost a thousand years of dark ages the arts were reborn and began their second life. Vasari divides their renaissance into the three stages of infancy, adolescence, and maturity.