Giorgio Vasari Research Articles

The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi*

This essay explores the role that the eighteenth-century Uffizi gallery played in the invention of the Renaissance. Under the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers, and especially during the reign of Grand Duke Peter Leopold (r. 1765–90), changes to the Medici collections and the gallery’s organization transformed an early modern cabinet of curiosities, paintings, and antiquities into a space in which a historical narrative of art, inspired by rereadings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, became visible in a building he designed. A succession of Uffizi personnel was increasingly preoccupied with how to see renaissance, and more specifically Tuscan rinascita, in the collections. The struggles between the director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and his vice-director Luigi Lanzi highlight how different understandings of the Renaissance emerged in dialogue with antiquarianism and medievalism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Uffizi would definitively become a museum of the Renaissance to inspire new forms of historical writing in the age of Michelet and Burckhardt.

Giorgio Vasari, l’attrice Flaminia romana e Leone de’ Sommi

Flaminia of Rome is a name wrapt in mystery, for while acclaimed by the Jewish playwright Leone de’ Sommi as the greatest actress of her time, there is only one other source (from Mantua) that describes her acting. Four sonnets which Giorgio Vasari dedicated to this mysterious actress reveal that in 1565 she performed in Florence in the Intermezzos of Leonardo Salviati’s play, Il granchio, which was staged by the Accademia Fiorentina. These sonnets also confirm that it was Vasari who drew up the set design for the play. Moreover, one of these sonnets may very well have been the source of inspiration for Leone de’ Sommi’s praiseworthy assessment of the actress, thus leading one to imagine his presence in Florence at the time.

Lodovico Dolce e uma crítica às Vite de Giorgio Vasari

Este artigo contempla alguns aspectos que ligam o Dialogo della pittura intitolato l´Aretino (1557), do Homem de Letras veneziano Lodovico Dolce, à obra do historiador Florentino, Giorgio Vasari, Le vitede´più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, da Cimabue, insino a´tempi nostri (1550). Procura-se demonstrar ao longo do texto que Dolce apoiou-se em conceitos teóricos expostos nas Vite, revertendo-os em seus próprios argumentos com o propósito de exaltar a pintura veneziana enquanto patrimônio cultural do Cinquecento, equiparando-a à arte da Tosco-romana, bem como buscou salientar a relevância da pintura de Ticiano, ausente da primeira edição da obra.

Describing the Female Sculptor in Early Modern Italy: An Analysis of the vita of Properzia de' Rossi in Giorgio Vasari's Lives

Bolognese sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi (c. 1490–1530) is distinguished as the only female artist to be afforded extended analysis in Giorgio Vasari's first edition of the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). Scholars have focused largely on the way in which Properzia's description aligns with derogatory assumptions about female nature in early modern Italy. While this is a defining characteristic of Properzia's vita, my paper explores alternative and potentially positive aspects of the text, by considering Vasari's attempts to integrate Properzia into the broader enterprise of the Lives and, more generally, art historical discourse of the time. I will argue that Vasari's approach invites a polemical response connected to these wider issues by setting up a paradoxical relationship between Properzia's archetypal female body and the manual movement required of it to sculpt. In contrasting notions of the feminine and the masculine, the noble body and the ignoble body, the intellectual and the manual, Properzia's vita can be connected specifically to the paragone (comparison) between painting and sculpture and also to questions relating to the status of the artist. In such a way the female artist is seen to take on an emblematic and instructive role within the text.

ISPRS Commission V Symposium: Close Range Image Measurement Techniques

The Photogrammetric RecordVolume 26, Issue 136 p. 381-383 Editorial ISPRS Commission V Symposium: Close Range Image Measurement Techniques Jon P. Mills, Jon P. Mills Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, EnglandSearch for more papers by this authorDerek D. Lichti, Derek D. Lichti Calgary, Alberta, CanadaSearch for more papers by this authorNorbert Pfeifer, Norbert Pfeifer Vienna, AustriaSearch for more papers by this author Jon P. Mills, Jon P. Mills Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, EnglandSearch for more papers by this authorDerek D. Lichti, Derek D. Lichti Calgary, Alberta, CanadaSearch for more papers by this authorNorbert Pfeifer, Norbert Pfeifer Vienna, AustriaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 December 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-9730.2011.00662.x Frontispiece. Close range image measurement techniques. An image from each of the six papers in this ISPRS Commission V 2010 Newcastle Symposium special issue. Top left: cross sections of colour-coded vector lengths of a simulated vortex ring (Westfeld and Maas). Top right: the Adorazione dei Magi painting by Giorgio Vasari in the church of Bosco Marengo in Alessandria, Italy, surveyed using a ShapeGrabber laser scanner (Remondino et al.). Centre left: the hilltop archaeological site of Drapham Dzong, Bhutan, surveyed (inset) by a Microdones md4-200 quadrotor UAV (Eisenbeiss and Sauerbier). Centre right: interactive web application for analysing Buddhist stone inscriptions of sutra in China with overlaid interpretation text (Schmidt et al.). Bottom left: modelling using Rhino software of the octagonal first Belvedere of the main spire of Milan Cathedral, Italy (Fassi et al.). Bottom right: changes in the volume of sand deposited near a screen on the Dutch coast over a 32-hour period as monitored by a terrestrial laser scanner (Lindenbergh et al.). Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume26, Issue136Special Issue: ISPRS COMMISSION V SYMPOSIUM 2010 CLOSE RANGE IMAGE MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUESDecember 2011Pages 381-383 RelatedInformation

Jonathan Unglaub. Review of "The Delight of Art: Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse" by David Cast.

Jonathan Unglaub. Review of "The Delight of Art: Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse" by David Cast.

Michelangelo: the drawings of a genius

Michelangelo's drawings endowed human physique with an expressive musculature that remains to be rivaled in its feeling for corporeal articulation. His drawings of male nudes in particular, fraught as they are with tempestuous longing, project both tension and pliancy, and a compelling sense of health in the exertions and torque of bodies; he was also readily able to bring contrary qualities of grace and swiftness to depictions of women and cherubim. With over 300 color plates and extensive contextualizing scholarship, Michelangelo: Drawings of a Genius is the most complete treatment of this work ever published, and thus constitutes a publication of great importance. Masterpieces from the world's finest museums are gathered here, from the early studies for the Battle of Cascina and the studies for the Sistine Chapel frescoes, to the drawings for the tomb of Julius II, the Medici tombs, the drawings for Tommaso de' Cavalieri and the later crucifixion scenes; also addressed are those works whose authenticity has been subject to debate. Works by other artists, done after the master's sketches, further illuminate the enormous influence of Michelangelo's art. Painter, sculptor, poet, architect and engineer, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) was both dauntingly prolific and relentlessly innovative in output. He sculpted two of his greatest works, the Pieta and David, before he turned 30, and created two of the world's best-known paintings on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome--the creation scenes from Genesis and The Last Judgment. Giorgio Vasari proposed that Michelangelo represented the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a view that has survived to this day.

Giambologna's giant and the cinquecento villa garden as a landscape of suffering

Jacopo Bonfadio wrote in 1541, when comparing the countryside around Naples to that near Florence: ‘Nature seems to lord with authority, but in ruling everywhere rejoices and laughs’. 1 The abundan...

Giorgio Vasari's Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1569–1572

According to his Ricordanze, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) received the commission in 1569 to create a new chapel containing a painting of the Incredulity of Saint Thomas from two Florentine brothers, Tommaso and Francesco Guidacci (active 1565–1575). Records and letters between October and December 1572, to and from Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini, the leading prelate and humanist in Florence, indicate that the painting was nearly completed. Two years later, Girolami Guidacci, on behalf of his family, donated the painting to the church of Santa Croce. In this essay, I analyze the influence of Italian fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century imagery on Vasari's painting as well as his interpretation of the religious theme in relation to the Counter‐Reformation. The biblical narrative of the Incredulity of Thomas, also known as the Doubting of Thomas, is first reported in the Gospel of Saint John 11:16; 20:24–29; and 21:2. It is later reinterpreted in Jacopo Voragine's Golden Legend.

The Origins of a Miraculous Image: Notes on the Annunciation Fresco in SS. Annunziata in Florence

IN CONNECTION WITH the recent interest in the early modern cult image within the discipline of art history there have been considerable debates and confusion on how to treat the image, which was, o...

The drawings of Bronzino

Drawings by the great Italian Mannerist painter and poet Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) are extremely rare. This important and beautiful publication brings together for the first time nearly all of the sixty drawings attributed to this leading draftsman of the 16th century. Each drawing is illustrated in color, discussed in detail, and shown with many comparative photographs. Bronzino's technical virtuosity as a draftsman and his mastery of anatomy and perspective are vividly apparent in each stroke of the chalk, pen, or brush. The younger generations of Florentine artists particularly admired Bronzino for his technical virtuosity as a painter, and Giorgio Vasari praised him for his powers as a disegnatore (designer and draftsman).

Mythologies of Artistic Biography: How the Artist Became

The painting which stole the spotlight at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 and gave the artist his first major success was Frederic Leighton's Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence, currently on display at the Royal Collection in the exhibition, Victoria and Albert: Art and Love. Taking as its subject, the scene described in Giorgio Vasari's sixteenth-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects – in which a Madonna painting by Cimabue, the first of Vasari's great Renaissance artists, is borne aloft to the church of Santa Maria Novella ‘with great rejoicing and blowing of trumpets’ – Leighton's picture gave expression to a particular nineteenth-century interest not just in Vasari, but in the mode itself of artistic biography. For this is a painting about the special status of the artist in society, an image that gives visual form not simply to Vasari's story of Cimabue's Madonna, but to tropes about public esteem and splendid patronage, rehearsed in narratives about the life and work of artists since Vasari. As Hilary Fraser has noted, the picture is ‘strikingly metafictional’, it is a ‘painting about painting’. The fact that the Cimabue Madonna, faithfully reproduced by Leighton, and still extant in the Uffizi, turned out to be a Duccio, hardly matters. What is important is what Leighton saw in Vasari's anecdote: the chance to say something about the meaning and worth of his own activity in the present, by restaging the honours paid to his predecessors. Queen Victoria certainly saw something in the picture because she bought it on the first day of the exhibition.1

The delight of art: Giorgio Vasari and the traditions of humanist discourse

The Delight of Art offers a highly original, erudite interpretation of Lives, one of the most influential texts on the arts. David Cast approaches Vasari's long, tripartite work as a complex rhetorical history rather than as an archival document mined for facts about the artists. He focuses on the delight Vasari mentions in his accounts of viewers' responses to works by artists from Giotto to Michelangelo. Cast finds in delight what might be called a threshold into the arena where the cultural and social orders met to produce a sphere of subjectivity as well as that of the compelling Renaissance invention, the artist.

Organic Patinas on Small Bronzes of the Italian Renaissance

Previous articleNext article No AccessOrganic Patinas on Small Bronzes of the Italian RenaissanceRICHARD E. STONERICHARD E. STONE Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Metropolitan Museum Journal Volume 452010 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/met.45.41558056 Views: 22Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2010 The Metropolitan Museum of ArtPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Marc Aucouturier, François Mathis, Dominique Robcis Les bronzes noirs antiques – nouvelles observations et mécanismes de création, Technè , no.4545 (May 2017): 114–123.https://doi.org/10.4000/techne.1345

Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*

Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*

Nanosecond Neutron Analysis for the search of the lost Leonardo’s masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari

Between 1505 and 1506 Leonardo Da Vinci painted his masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari, in Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of 500 in Florence. The unfinished mural remained visible until 1563, when architect Giorgio Vasari undertook a renovation of the Hall and all traces of the Battle of Anghiari were lost. However, scholarly interpretation and scientific evidence suggest that the mural could be on the eastern wall, hidden behind a brick wall built in 1563 by Vasari. This paper discusses the possibility of using NNA/APT (Nanosecond Neutron Analysis/Associated Particle Technique) to establish the presence of the masterpiece by identifying behind the Vasari’s wall chemical elements from the gesso preparation layer of the mural and possibly from its pigments. This paper reports on the experiments run with a simple NNA/APT system and the Monte Carlo simulations that have been carried out in order to outline the experimental setup of an advanced NNA/APT able to detect and locate the tiny amount of gesso and pigments.

Giotto's O: narrative, figuration, and pictorial ingenuity in the Arena Chapel

Andrew Ladis begins his book with Giorgio Vasari's famous story of in which the artist drew a perfect circle freehand, baffled Pope Benedict IX's foolish messenger, and demonstrated his artistic brilliance to those qualified to understand. The fundamental premise of Ladis' work is that the Arena Chapel, like Giotto's mythical O or tondo, must be understood as a complete, unified whole. He tells us, 'the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel has a depth that underpins the whole, an unpretentious profundity manifested in a formal order, and as in the case of the O, one must have the wherewithal to discern Giotto's achievement beyond the directness and emotional power of the narrative'.Ladis does not write about the program from the more expected standpoints of patronage or audience, or via extensive analysis of archival source material. Instead, without discounting the former approaches, Ladis considers Giotto's conception of the Arena Chapel in terms of biblical exegesis, a central geometry, and what he sees as the program's carefully planned symmetry. He urges the viewer to abandon the temporal narrative and follow 'visual cues that encourage readings that transcend narrative time,' and so he moves through a discussion of Giotto's frescoes, offering new insights about particular passages and continually considering how the meaning of each section resonates with others throughout the chapel.

PIXE analysis of a painting by Giorgio Vasari

AbstractAmong ion beam analysis (IBA) techniques, particle induced x‐ray emission (PIXE) is the most widely used in the field of cultural heritage, providing the elemental composition of materials in a non‐invasive and non‐destructive way. This paper reports on the analysis by PIXE performed at one of the external beamlines of the 3 MV Tandetron accelerator of the LABEC laboratory (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)—Florence) on a wood painting by Giorgio Vasari, belonging to the altar‐piece ‘Pala Albergotti’ (church of Sts Flora and Lucilla, Arezzo). The measurements were taken in the framework of a campaign of scientific investigations, promoted by the Soprintendenza of Arezzo, preliminary to the restoration of the whole altar‐piece. PIXE was used to identify the elemental composition of the original materials and to characterise the alteration layer visible on the surface of the painting. Measurements on the same spot with proton beams of different energies (differential PIXE) also allowed us to get information on the depth distribution of elements and on the structure of layers without the need of picking up samples. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Between the Lines: James Johnston Pettigrew as Connoisseur of Art: His Copy of Vasari's "Lives of the Artists"

James Johnston Pettigrew (1828-1863) of North Carolina was a well-traveled student of art and culture, and fluent in many European languages. During his sojourn in Europe, he purchased a number of books, including Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti, published by Le Monnier between 1846-1870. Significantly, Pettigrew's copy which is now in the North Carolina Collection of the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Pettigrew's alma mater—is not complete. General Pettigrew, a member of Lee's Tar Heels and a participant in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, died of wounds at the age of 35. This article discusses the significance of Pettigrew's copy of this important book.

L’insectarium de l’histoire de l’art ou le pouvoir de fascination de la peinture (Hommage à Daniel Arasse)

In this article, the author explores the way in which art historians, mostly French, have made a theoretical use of insects to analyze practices of painting and the modalities of the glance. Attention to painted flies in Renaissance painting or the modalities of vision specific to some insects such as stick insects has encouraged reflections on visuality and modes of representation. In the form of a tribute to art historian Daniel Arasse, the author reviews his interpretations, after Giorgio Vasari and Andre Chastel, of pictorial details such as the fly. In works of the Renaissance, as both Christ's symbol and macabre detail, the fly carries several meanings and Daniel Arasse brings to light the polysemy of these pictorial signs. In her analysis of fifteenth-century scenes of exorcism, the present author stresses the proximity of these small creatures, rendered in an illusory manner, with various embodiments of the devil expectorated by the possessed. This devil in motion is not a stable motif; like a pictorial collage, it condenses an amalgam of details of insects with sexual and phantasmagoric connotations. In her study of representations of insects, the author concentrates her attention on the fascinating power of these images.