Giotto's father and the family of Vasari's Lives

Abstract

In Giotto's Father Barolsky shows that Vasari's Lives is a major source for the social history of Italian Renaissance art. This book completes the author's Vasari trilogy, begun with Michelangelo's Nose and Why Mona Lisa Smiles. Giotto's Father is the first book to examine the extensive and deep theme of family in Vasari's Lives and to explain its importance in the study of the image of the family in the sixteenth century. The world of the artist's workshop was closely tied to the artist's family life. Artists were often trained by their fathers, and they sometimes married into the families of other artists. It is thus reasonable for Vasari to have viewed the community of artists as an extended family or brotherhood presided over by major patriarchal figures, for example, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Raphael. Building on the view of Vasari's work as a highly wrought, complex work of fiction, Barolsky shows how the Lives is not just a series of biographies of artists but a sustained, detailed, and highly fictionalized account of artists' families. In very nearly every biography, Vasari makes up stories of paternal blessing, of filial piety or prodigality, of noble and ignoble wives, of greedy, cruel, or violent relatives-tales that tell us a great deal about Vasari's own family in particular and about Renaissance family relations in general. Barolsky's explanation of just how deeply ideas about family inform Vasari's Lives provides a new and more complex understanding of one of the most important sources for the comprehension of the Renaissance artist. Vasari's family stories are often so fanciful that historians and art historians frequently ignore them because they seem unreliable. Barolsky compares these family tales to those told by Cellini, Michelangelo, and Bandinelli and shows that, although fictional, Vasari's stories ring true to the sentiments expressed by his contemporaries in their own fictionalized family histories. Fictions provide valuable clues to the realities that they metaphorically describe. As an extended historical fiction, Vasari's book tells us a great deal about the emotions, aspirations, and ideals of Renaissance life.