Reading Vasari

Reading Vasari, a collection of twenty-one essays, was conceived as a tribute to Paul Barolsky, whose own readings of Vasari as mythmaker, in books such as Giotto's Father and the Family in Vasari's Lives (1994), have resulted in many scholars reconsidering why Vasari wrote as he did and how we should now read his book. Some of the essays were presented at a symposium held at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, in November 2001; others were collected for the volume by Norman Land and Andrew Ladis. Together, the authors offer a range of responses, of varying sensitivity, to the literary qualities and historicity of Vasari's Lives.

The book aims, in part, to preserve the flavor of the 2001 symposium. Accordingly, it begins with the keynote address by Hayden Maginnis, followed by Barolsky's own exhortation to "reflect . . . upon the deeper significance of Vasari's fictions and what they might tell us" and the necessity for art historians themselves to make use of historical imagination, rather than "analyzing problems by chopping, dicing, and mincing art and its story" (34). In many of the remaining contributions, scholars take Barolsky's advice on board, unveiling how Vasari sometimes blends fact and fiction as part of his overall rhetorical strategy. In a couple of cases, authors seem content to provide a warmed-over version of previous scholarship, but such essays, mercifully, are few.

The bulk of the essays are divided into six sections. In the first, five scholars consider individual biographies from each of Vasari's three ages of art — corresponding roughly to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. This is followed by a section devoted to Vasari's representation of Rome as an important artistic and spiritual center. Part 3 concerns Vasari's approaches to women — mothers and artists — in the Lives. The remaining sections are dedicated to Vasari and the poetic imagination, Vasari and humor, and Vasari's perceptions of himself as an author and an artist.

In a short review such as this, it is impossible to do justice to all of the authors and their essays, or to engage fully with the ideas they present. Rather, it seems most useful to single out a few of the outstanding contributions. Andrew Ladis's "The Sorcerer's 'O' and the Painter Who Wasn't There" compares the Lives of Giotto and Buffalmacco as hero and anti-hero. Ladis cogently shows how Vasari presents Buffalmacco as an artist with Giotto's vision and depth, but one lacking Giotto's depth of commitment: he characterizes the story as that of "the saddening folly of an artist with talent but no prudence" (59). Ladis writes vividly, with verve, panache, and humor.

In "Vasari's Bronzino: The Paradigmatic Academician," Fredrika Jacobs, with her customary clarity and depth of thought, looks at the short, but important, biography of Bronzino that begins Vasari's account of the members of the Accademia del Disegno. She disproves recent arguments characterizing Vasari's approach to Bronzino as marginalizing, showing instead how important the life is as part of Vasari's strategy in advancing "the intellective doctrine of disegno and the aesthetic values of maniera as it was defined within the cultural politics of Cosimo's Florence" (103).

Similarly thoughtful and complex is David Cast's essay on the sixteenth-century understanding of the notion of delight. He notes that Vasari's individual biographies are filled with the notions of delight, marvel, and astonished praise, but that he carefully avoids any mention of delight in his prefaces. Instead, art here is allied with measurable truth — rule, order, proportion — and reason. Cast provides an analogy between the biographies and the private realm — where delight may be appropriate — and between the prefaces and the public realm — where art and action should be understood in terms of an appeal to reason.

Anne Barriault's contribution on the life of Piero di Cosimo is appropriately placed within the section on Vasari and poetry, for she suggests that the biography, "a song of loss" (192), is constructed according to the conventions of the pastoral elegy, a common poetic form in the sixteenth century. This identification of genre is completely convincing, but it would have been helpful if the author had gone further in citing some actual elegies that Vasari would likely have known.

Karen Goodchild's essay on "Lumi Fantastichi" strikes me as a fitting contribution to conclude this review, as it compares what Vasari the writer says — about fantastic light and landscape ornaments — with what Vasari the painter actually does. Her conclusion — which will undoubtedly surprise those who read Vasari but never look at his paintings — is that for Vasari, "manipulating paint to recreate tangibly the effects of things as they exist in light" (249) is one of the chief delights of painting.

Once having started reading Vasari, one finds it almost impossible to stop reading and rereading him. Reading Vasari is a compendium of essays that, by exploring Vasari's literary abilities, and rhetorical and historical strategies, shows us why this is so.