Giorgio Vasari

Vasari was an artist and architect in 16th-century Italy. But what really made him famous was his writing. He penned biographies of famous artists, but he wasn't exactly exacting about the details.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this
is an art history episode that I have had on
my list for a very very long time and then

(00:22):
I kind of forgot about it never happens to me, ever,
I'm kidding, it happens to me all the time. The
list is really long, and Tracy is referenced are like
thousand item lists that we have before. But I also
just have a separate list that I keep on my
phone of things that come up, like when I'm going
about my day in my life. Yeah, even then I
go back to that sometimes. Yeah. Even my my short

(00:43):
list in quotes is like fifty things, which is all
of my episodes for a year. Yeah, so, uh, Georgiova sorry,
was on that list for me for a long time,
and then I kind of, you know, it just got
sent to the side part of my brain that doesn't
really actively think about things. And then I went to
the really astonishingly beautiful Michelangelo exhibit that recently closed at

(01:06):
the met and Vasari comes up in it, so it
reminded me that we should talk about him because Georgio
Vasari is an interesting figure. He was an artist, an architect,
and most famously a biographer. I feel like we should
mention that this is definitely not an exhaustive biography of
Azary that we're doing, in part because he worked on

(01:28):
so many different things, and in part because a couple
of his works really have some interesting modern day follow
ups that really really intrigued me and that I wanted
to talk about. So I want to include those for
contexts when we start talking about the twenty and twenty
one century developments around them, so to get into his basics.
Georgio Vasari was born in the Tuscan provincial capital Arezzo, Italy,

(01:52):
on July eleven, and well known French stained glass artist
Guillaume Demaciat elsa time to see that in the Italian
based biographies, as Guiliemo di Marciat was one of Asari's
teachers when the future artist and biographer was still quite young,
and that arrangement for tutoring had been made by Vasari's

(02:13):
grandfather's cousin. A lot of family connections, but basically a
relative made this deal. That relative was Luca Seniorrelli, who
was a painter, and that relative also taught Giorgio as
a young boy. At the urging and arrangement of his father,
Vasari moved to Florence in the mid fifteen twenties. There

(02:33):
he apprenticed under painters Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli.
He also studied alongside two members of the Medici family,
Alessandro and Apolito. The Medici family, which was covered in
a series by previous hosts Sarah and Dablina, became important
to a Sari Duke, Cosimo first de Medici eventually became

(02:54):
a long time patron. And it was also in Florence
where Vasari discovered Michelangelo, and at one point he actually
claimed that he studied with Michelangelo, but the veracity of
that detail has been questioned. We're going to talk a
little bit about when that came up and why it
got a little bit of side eye later in the podcast.
But the two men were friends, and even if Michelangelo

(03:15):
never formally taught the Sari, the famed artist strongly influenced
his friends artistic efforts. Vasari painted in the Mannerist style,
and that name comes not from a depiction of manners
or primness. It comes from the Italian word maniera, and
that translates into style or way, as in the manner

(03:36):
in which something is done, so it's sometimes called the
stylish or stylized style. Mannerism was initially an Italian style
centered in Florence and Rome, running from roughly the fifteen
twenties up until Baroque art started to overtake it in
the fifteen nineties. That did make its way into other
parts of Europe, but its popularity was always mainly in Italy.

(03:59):
Man is Um generally departs from realism with a sort
of calculated artificiality. Limbs or next maybe elongated poses might
be sort of odd with slightly stressed or overcomplicated postures,
and colors sometimes appear hyper saturated to the point that
they no longer look real. So if you've ever looked

(04:20):
at a painting that seems to be an almost realistic
portrait from this period, particularly if it's Italian in origin,
and thought this is pretty good, but something isn't just
isn't quite right, you're probably actually looking at a piece
by a mannerist, and that slight awfulness of the image
is intentional. One of us Sorry's most famous works is

(04:41):
his Last Supper, which was commissioned in fifty six. The
nuns of the Florentine Murate Convent had commissioned the artist
to paint this work, and because men were not allowed
in the convent, he painted it on five panels that
could be moved from his studio into the convent, and
this painting is going to come up later on in
this show. But Vasari's architecture has been even more celebrated

(05:04):
than his painting. The Uffizi in Florence, Italy was started
by Vasari in fifteen sixty for Cosimo, the first of
the Medici family, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, that is
the patron tracy mentioned earlier, and the structure was originally
designed to be a government seat, but in fifteen seventy
four the top floor of it was converted into a
gallery by Cosimo's son, Francesco, the first. The Uffizi eventually

(05:29):
became a public gallery, and today the museum is home
to some of the most famous works of art in
the world, including Bocelli's Birth of Venus and La prima Vera,
Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch, and previous podcast subject Artemisia
Gentileski's Judith and Holofernes. In fifteen sixty two, thanks to
the patronage of Cosimo, Vasari was able to found the

(05:53):
Florentine Academy of Design. Everyone ended up connected to that thing.
Basically every famous it is that came through Italy around
this time was connected to the Florentine Academy of Design.
Also for Duke Cosimo the first, Vasari remodeled the Palazzo
Vecchio and updated its interiors with art in fifteen sixty four.

(06:14):
He also built what's known as the Vasari Corridor, and
this is a passageway that goes through the center of
the city and it enabled the medicis to move from
the Palazzo Vecchio to the residences at Palazzo p d
without having to mingle with the public. One of the
pieces of art and the Palazzo Vecchio that was done
by a Massari is a fresco. It's titled the Battle

(06:36):
of Marciano. This fresco is in what's known as the
Hall of five Hundred, which got its name from the
five hundred members of the Grand Council of Florence. It
is a massive, massive, piece. It's also one of many
pieces that Vasari, along with his team of assistance, produced
for the Palazzo Vecchio, but that particular painting is going

(06:57):
to come up again later on in the show. And
far more than his painting or his architecture, the Sari
is known for his biographical writing. His book Lives of
the most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a massive,
multi volume effort that's considered the beginning of art history writing.

(07:18):
The book, first published in fifteen fifty, covers a roughly
three hundred years span from the thirteenth century of two
Vasari's contemporaries in the fifteen hundreds, and in addition to biographies,
the book contains additional essays about the progression of art
through three periods of development. The A Sari identified those
three periods where Classical Antiquity, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance.

(07:41):
The first edition of this book was well received, but
sorry was already well known in Florence, but his acclaim
quickly grew as his writing started circulating. It was after
its publication that his career as an artist and architect
really picked up. When Michelangelo read his biography in the book.
He was moved to a poem for Vasari, praising him

(08:02):
for granting artists everlasting life through writing. That amuses me
because a lot of folks think of art as giving
everlasting life to the artist. Yeah uh yeah, they think
of the art being the legacy. But this was again
a completely new idea that someone would publish this, This
biography of artists, completely broke all of the previous known

(08:26):
conventions of biographies in terms of its subject matter. And
the second edition of this book, which was released in
fifteen sixty eight, expanded significantly, including biographies of the Sari
himself and other artists that we're still living during its writing,
and this is the version that's been most commonly translated
and became really famous worldwide. This is actually still in

(08:48):
print today in some cases. One of the major changes
in the second edition is the greater space that was
devoted to Michelangelo, who died four years prior to this
new edition of the book in fifty sixty four. V.
Sarry added information about the work Michelangelo created in the
time between fifteen fifty and his death, and it described

(09:08):
the lavish funeral arrangements that the Sary, along with members
of the Florentine Academy of Design had staged. Incidentally, Michelangelo
is without a fan of spectacle of that nature and
probably would have been horrified by this regal memorial. It's
also in this edition that Vasari first claimed, at least
in writing, to have studied under Michelangelo. Yeah, the fact

(09:32):
that he didn't claim it until after Michelangelo had died
made people kind of go, come on, really, and here
is the problem with the Sari's biographical writing. He was
not particularly obsessive about ensuring all of it was factual,
and he was a little bit gossipy, and he prioritized

(09:52):
making things exciting for the reader over telling the st truth.
We'll talk about how he handled some of the criticism
of his work in just a moment, but first we
will pause for a little sponsor break. In the second
edition of the book that we reference before the break,

(10:14):
the sorry actually makes a point to address some of
the criticism of his work. In one section, he writes,
in defense of his verbose pros quote, if it has
seemed to some of you that, on occasion I have
been rather long winded and somewhat prolix in my writing,
having desired as far as possible to be clear and
to state matters for others, so that things which are

(10:35):
not understood or which I have not known how to
say at first, would at any rate be obvious. And
if something said in one place is sometimes repeated in another,
there are two reasons for this. First because the material
treated required it, and second because during the time I
rewrote this work and had it reprinted, I was interrupted
on more than one occasion, not simply for days, but

(10:57):
for months in my writing, either by travel or by
an excessive number of tasks, paintings, plans and building projects.
And under such circumstances it is, in my opinion, and
I freely admitted, almost impossible to avoid errors. So he
has defended his verbose prose by writing that which was

(11:20):
all one sentence, uh yeah, verbose lee, and really boils
down to you, I'm busy, y'all, though some of his
stories are also very fanciful. In the Life of Giotto,
he describes the artist drawing a perfect circle when a
sample of his work was requested, and the story claimed

(11:42):
that a courtier visited Giotto to tell him that Pope
Benedict the eleventh wish to commission a new painting for St. Peter's.
He needed to see prospective artists work to make this decision,
and the sarry wrote Hiatto, who was a man of
courteous manners, immediately took a paper and with a pen
dipped in red, fixing his arm firmly against his side

(12:04):
to make a compass of it, and with a turn
of his hand he made a circle so perfect that
it was a marvel to see it. Having done it,
he turned smiling to the courtier and said, here is
the drawing. But he, thinking he was being laughed at, asked,
am I to have no other drawing than this? This
is enough and too much, replied Shatto. Send out with
the others and see if it will be understood. So

(12:28):
at this point in the story, according to the Sari,
the messenger thinks that he is being mocked and he leaves,
but he does include that circle image with other art
that he submits to the Pope. Uh and it described
then to the Pope shadow seemingly effortless circle, and the
pope quote saw that Ghiado must surpass greatly all the

(12:49):
other painters of his time, And Vasari continues. So the
Pope made him come to Rome and he painted for
him in St. Peter's, and there never left his hands
work better finished. Wherefore the Pope, esteeming himself well served,
gave him six hundred buckets of gold, besides having shown
him so many favors that it was spoken of through

(13:09):
all Italy. So the story has never been verified. It
has been retold and used as an example of artistry
ever since the sorry first wrote it down. This whole
story of the perfect circle is also used for didactic purposes.
To search the web, you will find lots of examples
of writers using it to non artists that, whatever their

(13:31):
skill set, it's better to show their abilities in simple
direct ways, rather than feeling compelled to spend too much
time convincing someone else of what they have to offer.
I'm gonna say it reminds me of like the terrible
job advice that you will find in job advice books,
who were like, just show up at the company to
try to get their attention instead of doing what they
asked you to do and applying for the job. So uh,

(13:55):
even though it's kind of questionable advice, but sorry, he's
possibly made up stories do have legs? Yeah, his uh,
I will say his work is really entertaining, and it
does make you think, even if it's maybe uh, strictly
from his mind and not from reality. Vasari's Lives of
Artists was also fairly biased toward Italian art as better

(14:17):
than all others. Regarding the Renaissance, va sorry credited Chimabue
and Giotto with its inception enlisted Michelangelo is the culmination
of this rebirth period. It has also been called a
work of pro medici propaganda for the rich and powerful
family because it casts them and specifically Costum of the
First who it's dedicated to, as benevolent philanthropists and leaves

(14:40):
out any of the bad stuff about them. Vasari has
been criticized for his almost fawning writing about the works
of Michelangelo. Here's an excerpt of his writing about Michelangelo's
famous sculpture. David quote, when it was built up and
all was finished, he uncovered it. And it cannot be
denied that this work has carried off the palm from

(15:01):
all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin. And
it may be said that neither the Marforio in Rome,
nor the Tiber and Nile of the Belvedere, nor the
Giants of Monte Cavallo are equal to it in any respect,
with such proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelangelo finish it?
For in it may be seen the most beautiful contours

(15:23):
of legs, with attachments of limbs, and slender outlines of
flanks that are divine. Nor has there ever been seen
opposed so easy or any grace to equal that in
his in this work, or feet, hands and heads so
well in accord one member with another, in harmony, design
and excellence of artistry and of a truth. Whoever has

(15:44):
seen this work need not trouble to see any other
work executed in sculpture, either in our own or in
other times, by no matter what craftsman. So yeah, basically
that is it. If you can only see one statue
in your I see this one. Uh. To be fair,
Michelangelo is amazing. I mean, I can understand why it

(16:05):
would inspire that kind of writing. But despite these criticisms,
Vasari's book continues to be recognized as a vitally important
moment in art history. It is entertaining, it even comes
off as a little flip at times, but it also
set the tone of art history writing going forward, and
it is still used as a primary source by scholars,

(16:26):
though it's problems are acknowledged. It's not like they set
it out and say this is all correct. They're kind
of like this, there's some problems with this text, but
it is an important text. He is often called the
first art historian, and he certainly did not invent the biography.
There had been plenty of those written by the mid
fifteen hundreds, but he was the first in Europe to
write about the lives of artists. Six years after the

(16:48):
second edition of his book was published, But Sorry died
in Florence on June four. He was sixty two. All Right,
we are about to delve into, uh, some interesting modern
happenings regarding two of a Sari's works. So to keep
all of that together, we're going to go ahead and
take our sponsor break a little bit early, and we'll
do that now. Two important pieces of A Sorry history

(17:17):
are actually fairly recent developments. The first is tied to
that painting that we mentioned in the Hall of five hundred,
the Battle of Marciano. It is possible that this painting
is actually hiding a lost work of Leonardo da Vinci's
titled The Battle of Angiari. First, here's the story on
da Vinci's painting. In four Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned

(17:38):
by a statesman named Piero Soderini to paint a battle
from fourteen forty featuring an army from Milan being defeated
by Italian forces in Tuscany. Leonardo da Vinci took the commission,
but the painting, which was done using a new oil
technique that you wanted to try, was not ever finished. Allegedly,
the paint was just too thick and it started to

(18:00):
slide and dripped down the wall before it could dry.
After a number of efforts were made to save the work,
Da Vinci determined that it was a lost cause. Coincidentally,
another fresco on the opposite wall, started by Michelangelo, also
went unfinished. In the case of Michelangelo's project, he was
called away to work on one of his most famous efforts,

(18:21):
the tomb of Pope Julius the Second. Both of these
unfinished works remained in their abandoned state for decades. When
Cosimo the First decided to renovate the Palazzo Vecchio, both
pieces were believed to have been destroyed to make way
for new art by Vasari and his team. Art historians
have wandered for years about this lost Evnci painting and

(18:43):
whether it's still existed somewhere. In the nineteen seventies, one researcher,
Marisio Sarattini from the University of California, San Diego, thought
he found a clue when he noticed a green banner
in the Saris painting with the words Cherkatrova painted on
it that may seek and find. So this was perceived

(19:04):
to be a clue left behind by the Sari and
a team eventually was granted permission to use high frequency
radar to scan the room and they found that there
was a hollow space behind the Saris painting Battle of Marciano.
The next step, and all of this was playing out
very slowly over years and years, was to drill a

(19:25):
series of tiny holes in the masary work to send
a camera into the wall and see if they could
find evidence of this lost painting, and that is where
things got really hairy. There was a very vocal resistance
to the plan in the art history community. After all,
it was going to be putting little holes in a
known piece of historically significant art, and the hopes of

(19:45):
finding an even more significant piece underneath it, maybe And
at some point in this back and forth, it was
agreed in Tleven that the team could proceed with their
plan to run a tiny camera through the front of
the Sari painting, but they could only run it through
existing cracks or drill into spaces that had only recently

(20:07):
been restored, so that their plan was significantly changed from
the fourteen spots they had originally planned to drill, and
they only had one week that they were allowed to
do this research. Video captured masonry work and possible brush
strokes on a surface, and a sample of grit captured
from the shallow void behind the Massari showed some evidence

(20:30):
of black pigment when it was tested, which made it
seem like the team was really onto something. But before
you get really invested, that's sort of where the story ends.
A hundred and fifty art historians from museums and galleries
around the world put together a petition to stop this project.
An investigation was opened by the Florence Magistrates. The search

(20:54):
for the painting, which was part of a project that
National Geographic was filming for a show, was halted copletely
in the fall of art. Scholars made the case that
the money that was being put into this project would
have been better spent on restoring the v sari that
they were trying to drill holes into, and that Saraceni's
initial clue of the words and the vasari painting really

(21:16):
was not all that illuminating to begin with. They were
kind of surprised that things had gone this far just
based on one kind of hunch that started thirty years prior.
The second modern event around a Sary is a lot
more satisfying, although it starts out pretty harrowing. Indeed it
does h In nineteen sixty six, after days and days
of rain, the Arno River overflowed its retaining walls and

(21:39):
flooded Florence, Italy. This was a historic catastrophic event for
the city. You will find articles about the Great Florence Flood,
and a great deal of art was covered in muddy,
oily water. The Saris, massive eight by twenty one ft
that's two point four by six point four meter long
painting of the Last Supper that we referenced early year,

(22:00):
was created in fifty six, was badly damaged at the
time of the flood. The painting was no longer at
the convent where it had been first delivered. That convent
had eventually closed, and in eighteen sixty five the work
was moved to the Castellani Chapel and the Basilica of
Santa Croce. It was moved once again to the Museum

(22:21):
of Opera refectory in the nineteen fifties. During the flood,
the painting was completely submerged for more than twelve hours.
The lower parts of the work were covered in this oily,
dirty water for much longer, and initially all that conservators
could do was separate the five panels of the painting

(22:41):
and try to get them dried as quickly but as
carefully as possible, and then apply a paper treatment to
each of the separated panels to prevent the paint from
peeling away. The paper that was used was a Japanese
wet strength mulberry paper, and after it was laid on
top of the last supper, methacrylate resin was painted over it,
but additional damage was still forthcoming. The separated panels were

(23:05):
placed on different racks to drive, but the panels themselves
shrank and cracked in the process. That base layer of
Jesso shifted around as well. Um, that was how it
was stored for almost fifty years. Yes, things shrank and
that basse layers started to shift. They basically were like,
let's not touch this anymore. Let's set it aside and

(23:25):
store it as safely as we can and see what
sorts of preservation technologies developed that maybe will help us
face it. Let's let's hope future people's can fix this. Yes,
in short, stop touching it. In two thousand four, the
painting was moved still in pieces, to the Opa Ficuo
de la Pietra Dura in Florence, and the o p

(23:47):
D as it is known, is the first modern lab
focused on art restoration in Italy. As technology did develop
that would enable conservators to restore the painting, Getty Foundation
funded the o p D with a grant to train
their staff to treat the damaged artwork. The thousand dollar

(24:08):
grant was made with a long term goal that would
enabled the op D to employ experts to train conservators
for two generations to stabilize and restore damaged works of art. Yes,
so it wasn't just this last Supper that they wanted
to be able to save. They wanted to really create
a legacy uh and a groundwork of knowledge for the

(24:28):
op D so that they would be able to save
more art going forward, and that resin and paper that
kept the paint intact also cause some challenges to restoration efforts.
The acrylic resin turned out to be difficult to remove
without further damaging the painting, but after several years at
the o p D, a system was developed to remove

(24:49):
the paper sheets while maintaining the integrity of the paint,
and this offered the first real hope that the painting
would be restored. The Getty Foundation described the work on
the Last Supper this way a quote. Together, the team
developed a conservation solution based on the support system originally
devised by Vasari himself, which has stabilized the painting while

(25:09):
also allowing the wooden panels to move naturally with standard
temperature and humidity fluctuations. The team was also able to
recover an unanticipated amount of the original painted surface, revealing
the artist's hand and surprising detail that shrinkage that had
taken place after the floodwater dried out was slowly reversed
by expanding the panels with these tiny poplar wood pieces

(25:33):
that would be inserted into slits in the backside of
the panels. Another grant provided by Prada paid for the
cost of very meticulously smoothing out and restoring the paint
on the face of the painting. On the fiftieth anniversary
of the flood, November four, sixteen, the Sorry's Last Supper
was once again viewable to the public for the very

(25:55):
first time. Yeah. So that is a nice way I
think to end it, with a piece of art being
saved so that we can all appreciate the saris work
uh forever hopefully. It's interesting that painting was what he
was maybe least lauded for, but we uh, we have
painting as well as his architecture still stands certainly, and

(26:17):
his book has been published and published over and over,
so we have a lot of of the Sorry circulating
still in the modern culture, which I love. Do you
also have some listener mail for us? I sure do.
This one is by our listener Krista. She wrote us
kind of a lengthy letter, so I'm not going to
read the whole thing. I'm going to read kind of

(26:38):
an excerpt. She says, Hi, I wanted to write in
for quite a while. To convey my appreciation, but I
never had any type of meaningful connection to a cover
topic worth communicating until your recent podcast on Mary Breckinridge.
When I saw the title, I could hardly believe it.
Only a week prior, I had just finished reading Rooted
in the Mountains, Reaching to the World midwif Ry at
Kentucky's Frontier School by and Zie Cockham and Arlene E. Keeling.

(27:02):
My interest in this book was piqued because of my
own grandmother's personal connection with the Frontier Nursing Service. My
grandmother completed nursing school at Philadelphia General Hospital in Pennsylvania
in nineteen fifty five, and the experience was something of
a trial by fire for her, especially as she was
only twenty three when she finished her studies. She told
me about the long shifts, the haughty doctors, the lonely

(27:24):
TV ward, and the frightening emergency room into which all
manner of wounded patients entered, some unfortunately never to depart.
In spite of the challenges. She often recalls those years fondly,
focusing on bright spots like the strong camaraderie she developed
with other nurses, But she was never truly satisfied with
the urban hospital setting. She described her discontent as being

(27:44):
rooted in a desire to connect more personally with her patients.
At Philadelphia General, dozens of patients cycled in and out
of the hospital every day, making it hard to form
relationships and creating a sense of loneliness for my grandmother.
So when she graduated, she researched other facilities recruiting nurses
at the time, and the one that she ended up
choosing this is where I'm paraphrasing and kind of editing down,

(28:07):
was called the Miners Memorial Hospital, which had just opened
in Middlesboro, Kentucky, And she decided to take a position there.
And so uh she moved there with all of her
worldly possessions just in her car. Uh and eventually like
set up a life in this this hospital. She had
been afraid that she might make the wrong decision christa Rights.

(28:29):
The hospital was specifically built to serve the miners of
the area, but despite the impeccable facilities, state of the
art technology, and brand new equipment, initially the hospital remained empty. Puzzled.
My grandmother later learned that many of the little mountain
women that's a quote did not want their husbands undressing
and being in their thinking indecent around the young female nurses.

(28:49):
They were frightened of the fast city nurses being in
close proximity to their exposed men folk. But this her
grandmother did persist, and people did start come in to
the hospital. Uh and it it developed a really positive reputation,
and patients soon started coming for treatment, and they would
come with their entire families. And uh it really fulfilled

(29:11):
this this personal relationship that her grandmother had wanted. She
some mates and says, eventually she and my grandfather settled
in Louisville, Kentucky, and they're raised my mother and uncle.
Louisville was my childhood home, and I have grown into
a proud Kentucky in Therefore, in honor of my family's roots,
I have decided to send a taste of Kentucky to
you both as a thank you for all the amazing
work you've done. Please enjoy the local goodies from my

(29:33):
part of the world. They all originate from businesses located
in central Kentucky. Later this week, Tracy is going to
be in the office and she will see this immense
box of delicious treats goodness. So Krista, thank you one
for sharing your grandmother's personal story with us. We always
say how much we love when people have a personal
connection to the history we talked about. And to thank

(29:54):
you for the astonishing and very weighty uh box of
goodies that you sent. It was really far too generous,
so we appreciate it. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. You can also find us
across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History.
Missed in History dot com is also our website address.
You can come there or find every episode of the

(30:14):
show that has ever existed. You can also find show
notes for any of the episodes that Tracy and I
have worked on. You may also find occasional other goodies
here and there, so come and visit us at missed
in History dot com. For more on this and thousands

(30:35):
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.