The Burlington Magazine and the Death of Vasari's Lives

Abstract

The Burlington Magazine and the Death of Vasari’s Lives PAUL BAROLSKY One of the “great books” in the canon of Western literature, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is a masterpiece of imaginative literature. It has also played a crucial role in determining how novelists and art historians alike have come to think about artists during the modern period. First published in Florence in 1550 and reissued in significantly amplified form in 1568, Vasari’s magisterial book is too often debased by those scholars who seek to extract facts from his text without adequate attention to its poetical character. Modern art historians sometimes write about Vasari’s book as if its author were preparing to submit work for inclusion in a scholarly journal; they may well condemn him for his errors and distortions of facts. That Vasari’s book was shaped by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, among other great poetical writers, seems to matter little to the many researchers in pursuit of the facts above all else. When art historians do acknowledge the literary character of Vasari’s book, they frequently dismiss it as “mere literature.” More often than not, scholars simply ignore the imaginative passages of Vasari’s book precisely because they are deeply fictional. Generally speaking, art historians do not know how to read Vasari. They fail to see how fiction can advance our understanding of history. Since art historians are in the business (and I do mean business) of classifying works of art (chronologically , geographically, stylistically, iconographically, etc.), they do not take sufficiently seriously the art of storytelling— Vasari’s storytelling—which both instructs and gives pleasure . Most art historians are not very interested in pleasure as it pertains to their subject—at least, not in their writing. arion 20.2 fall 2012 The June 2011 editorial of the esteemed Burlington Magazine , written on the occasion of the celebration of the 500th birthday of Vasari, put emphasis on “the vast amount of information about art that we find in the Lives”—“information collected by Vasari himself or others.” Vasari’s book, The Burlington Magazine asserted, is “an indispensible source of historical information.” This is not an unreasonable characterization of The Lives as far as it goes. But this viewpoint is severely limited, if not a distortion. For The Burlington Magazine, which is steeped in a deep tradition of antiquarian scholarship, the word “information” has primarily to do with the facts. The unsigned author of the editorial seems scarcely interested in the ways in which the facts are shaped into various meaningful, indeed truthful, stories. The storytelling, poetical criticism, and allegory of The Lives presumably would come under the category of what the editor refers to, with scant attention, as the book’s “literary qualities .” In its summary remarks on Vasari, The Burlington seems utterly indifferent to the role of imagination in the pursuit of the historical truth, even though The Lives is far more than the sum of the facts—far more than “information ,” narrowly defined. Vasari wrote before the modern distinction between factual history and fiction. For him, history is often given form as fiction. It is “literature.” In other words, The Lives is an elevated or imaginative form of writing. Although the editor of The Burlington is skeptical about Vasari’s literary preparation , a survey of almost forty extant letters written by him between 1532 and 1550, included in the classic Milanesi edition of The Lives, demonstrates a highly developed literary sensibility. Suffice it to read, for example, the letter Vasari wrote to Bishop Giovio in 1532, with its superb and amusing description of a drawing of a tree of hats—including the headgear of popes, bishops, cardinals, and others of high clerical or social station—hats that satirically rain down on various beasts. Vasari’s description is a tour de force, abundant evidence of literary sophistication—at the age of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 64 twenty-one! (All our college graduates with majors in art history should write so well! Indeed, all art historians should write so well!) As scholars came to notice long ago, Vasari quickly learned more than a little about rhetoric, especially in the description of works of art, from the...