Giorgio Vasari

Aside from his career as a painter, Vasari was successful as an architect.^[12] His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment^{[clarification needed]}. The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures lining the river that are open to the river and appear to embrace the riverside environment.^{[citation needed]}

In Florence, Vasari also designed the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio, and winds around the exterior of several buildings. It was once the location of the Mercado de Vecchio.^[13]

He renovated the medieval churches of

In Santa Croce, he produced the painting of The Adoration of the Magi commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567. It was restored recently, before being put on exhibition in 2011 in Rome and in Naples. Eventually, it will be returned to the church of Santa Croce in Bosco Marengo (Province of Alessandria, Piedmont).^{[citation needed]}

In 1562, Vasari built the octagonal dome on the

In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammannati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia.

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

Often called "the first art historian",

The Lives also included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts.[16]^[8] The book was partly rewritten and extended in 1568,^[8] with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).^{[citation needed]}

The work shows a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is ignored systematically in the first edition. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian), it did so without achieving a neutral point of view. ^{[citation needed]}

Many inaccuracies exist within his Lives. For example, Vasari writes that Andrea del Castagno killed Domenico Veneziano, which is incorrect; Andrea died several years before Domenico. In another example, Vasari's biography of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, whom he calls "Il Sodoma", published only in the second edition of the Lives (1568) after Bazzi's death, condemns the artist as being immoral, bestial, and vain. Vasari dismisses Bazzi's work as lazy and offensive, despite the artist's having been named a Cavalier of the Supreme Order of Christ by Pope Leo X and having received important commissions for the Villa Farnese and other sites.^[17]

Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes seem plausible, while others are assumed fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that supposedly, the older master repeatedly tried to brush away (a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles). He did carry out research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and his biographies are considered more reliable in the case of his contemporary painters and those of the preceding generation. Modern criticism – with new materials produced by research – has revised many of his dates and facts.^[8]

Vasari included a short autobiography at the end of the Lives, and added further details about himself and his family in his lives of

According to the historian Richard Goldthwaite,[18] Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the term "competition" (or "concorrenza" in Italian) in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, and stressed the concept in his introduction to the life of Pietro Perugino, in explaining the reasons for Florentine artistic preeminence. In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition amongst themselves for commissions kept them so. Competition, he said, is "one of the nourishments that maintain them".^{[citation needed]}

Gallery

• Paintings by Giorgio Vasari
• 
  Alessandro de Medici resting
• 
  Pieta
• 
  Bird catchers
• 
  Holy Family, with Andrea del Sarto
• 
  Last Supper
• 
  Entombment
• 
  Temptations of St. Jerome
• 
  St. Luke painting the Virgin
• 
  Annunciation
• 
  Justice
• 
  The Prophet Elisha

• Frescos and decorations by Giorgio Vasari
• 
  Interior of the dome of Florence Cathedral
• 
  Cosimo studies the taking of Siena.
• 
  Apotheosis of
  Cosimo I
• 
  Defeat of the Venetians in Casentino

• Libro de' Disegni by Giorgio Vasari
• 
  Giorgio Vasari with drawings by

  Botticelli, and Raffaellino del Garbo
• 
  Giorgio Vasari with drawings by Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Raffaellino del Garbo

• Architecture by Giorgio Vasari
• 
  Uffizi colonnade and loggia
• 
  Loggia of Vasari in Arezzo
• 
  San Pietro in Montorio, Rome
• 
  Tomb of Michelangelo
• 
  Sala dei Cento Giorni - Giorgio Vasari - 1547 - Palazzo della Cancelleria
• 
  Villa Giulia - Court - Vasari - Vignola
• 
  Part of the Loggia del Mercato Vecchio, Florence, just prior to its demolition in the 1880s

References and sources

References

Sources

• The Lives of the Artists Oxford University Press, 1998.
  ISBN 0-19-283410-X
• Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volumes I and II. Everyman's Library, 1996.
  ISBN 0-679-45101-3
• Vasari on Technique. Dover Publications, 1980.
  ISBN 0-486-20717-X
• Life of Michelangelo. Alba House, 2003.
  ISBN 0-8189-0935-8
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1912). "Giorgio Vasari" . Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

Further reading

• Barriault, Anne B.; Ladis, Andrew T.; Land, Norman E.; Wood, Jeryldene M., eds. (2005). Reading Vasari. London: Philip Wilson.
• Cast, David J., ed. (2013). The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari. Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England: Routledge.
  ISBN 9781409408475
  .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Giorgio Vasari.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Giorgio Vasari.

• Works by Giorgio Vasari at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Giorgio Vasari at Internet Archive
• Works by Giorgio Vasari at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Giorgio Vasari at Open Library
• Biography of Vasari and analysis for four major works
• Petri Liukkonen. "Giorgio Vasari". Books and Writers.
• Giorgio Vasari – The First Art-Historian

Copies of Vasari's Lives of the Artists online:

• “Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.” Site created by Adrienne DeAngelis. Now largely completed in the posting of the Lives, intended to be re-translated to become the unabridged English version.
• Le Vite, 1550 Unabridged, original Italian.
• Stories Of The Italian Artists From Vasari, translated by E L Seeley, 1908. Abridged, in English.
• Le Vite – Edizioni Giuntina e Torrentiniana
• Gli artisti principali citati dal Vasari nelle Vite (elenco)
• Excerpts from the Vite combined with photos of works mentioned by Vasari.