Giorgio Vasari: Storico e critico (review)

Vasari's Lives is essential reading for those wishing to understand Italian Renaissance art and the lives of the artists who created it. In many scholarly works Vasari's overarching themes are ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented. In Giorgio Vasari storico e critico, Mario Pozzi and Enrico Mattioda seek to outline the unifying principles behind the Lives —principles that Vasari derived from the study of history and of specific cases. Their book offers some insight into Vasari's thought, but ultimately contains little that will astonish those who have read the Lives attentively.

Because Pozzi and Mattioda aim primarily to reveal the coherence of Vasari's critical system, they do not spend much time placing his concepts into a contemporary context. Their book is in some ways a compendium of long passages taken from Vasari, organized according to heading and interspersed with the authors' arguments. A reader unfamiliar with Vasari, but wishing to read in one place his dispersed commentary on a given topic or critical term, will find this useful. However, those who have read Vasari from cover to cover will find it repetitive and sometimes painfully obvious: for example, that the final era surpasses the previous ones in its knowledge of disegno, and in facility, gracefulness, and license is clear to anyone who has read the prefaces —it is not necessary to prove it at such length. Occasionally, the authors do break from this format to show how Vasari may have derived some of his ideas and terminology from writers such as Alberti, Aretino, and Machiavelli.

One of their premises is that, thought Vasari describes the progress of art to perfection in the Cinquecento, with Michelangelo at its pinnacle, it is mistaken to infer that Vasari thinks his is the only kind of perfection. Other perfections are possible —for example, that represented by Raphael's gracefulness and universality, or by Leonardo's unity of color. But, they contend, there is a gradation of perfections. Michelangelo's perfection is greatest because of his self-imposed restriction to the highest possible subject: the human body and passions, in which field he cannot be surpassed.

The authors emphasize that Vasari's critical judgments can be divided into two main categories —those relative to the form and content of the work, and those grounded in its effect —the emotions the work evokes in its spectators. They contend that, for the latter, Vasari creates a careful hierarchy of language, from artists whose work merely evokes pity (compassione), to those eliciting marveling admiration or stupefaction (maraviglia, stupore), and finally to those very few —including Michelangelo —whose work inspires fear and trembling (timore e tremore). In their interpretation, this biblical phrase is the greatest praise Vasari bestows upon any work. Therefore its absence from, say, the life of Raphael means that Raphael's form of perfection is lesser than Michelangelo's. One might argue instead that fear and trembling are the most appropriate responses to the frescoed Last Judgment, as much for its subject matter as its style, and that they are simply not suitable in other contexts.

It is sometimes argued that Vasari's system contains not just a prescription for the progress of the arts, but also the expectation that after Michelangelo they will decline. Pozzi and Mattioda correctly contend that this is not the case. Instead, they say, Vasari indicates the way forward. He tends to focus primarily on the three major arts —painting, sculpture, and architecture. In the second edition, he pays more considered attention to the so-called "minor arts" —manuscript illumination, engraved gems, embroidery, mosaic, and a host of others. Many factors contributed to their new emphasis in 1568: for example, the urging of Vasari's adviser, Vincenzo Borghini, that he expand his scope and write a "universal history" of the arts. Among the more interesting ideas that Pozzi and Mattioda put forth is that Vasari emphasized the minor...