La Vita delle 'Vite' Vasariane: Profilo storico di due edizioni

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects has often been referred to as the Bible of Italian Renaissance art. Vasari's monumental collection of artists' lives was first published in Florence in 1550 and much revised in a second edition of 1568. The Lives is an argument in three parts, in each of which Vasari presents not only accounts of artists' lives, but a history of art. He covers art from antiquity to his own day, with a focus on how art reached perfection in the work of Michelangelo. Vasari tells us not only about what it is to be an artist in his day, he tells us why this is important.

In the final life, which is on his own career, Vasari writes that the idea to commence the Lives originated at a dinner hosted by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome in the mid-1540s. The dinner was attended by the literati of Rome, including Paolo Giovio, Claudio Tolomei, Annibale Caro, and Francesco Maria Molza. According to Vasari, it was Giovio's intent to write a collection of artists' lives with his assistance, but Vasari was later convinced by Giovio and others that he, Vasari, should be the one to write the Lives. The dinner is both fact and fiction: fact in that Vasari most likely did enjoy such meals at the Palazzo Farnese; fiction in that it probably didn't happen in quite this way — at least one of the participants mentioned by Vasari, Molza, was deceased at the time Vasari claims this particular meal occurred. The fiction, however, allows us to consider how Vasari scripted his career and the writing of the Lives. The dinner places Vasari at the heart of Rome's literati, echoing Plato's Symposium in a way that is both critically significant and, by then, fashionable in sixteenth-century Roman courtly circles. This fiction places Vasari within a larger humanist context.

Carlo Maria Simonetti's La Vita delle 'Vite' Vasariane: Profilo storico di due edizioni offers the reader an appreciation of the practical side of humanism in the sixteenth century: specifically, what was involved in getting the Lives printed. Simonetti presents an account of the two printing houses in Florence that produced Vasari's work, the Torrentino press in 1550 and the Giunti press for the second edition. We read here about the financial and physical difficulties of developing a printing house in Florence at this time, as well as the uses to which the Medici sought to adapt this business. The Fleming, Laurens Lenaerts van der Beke, known in Florence as Lorenzo Torrentino, brought the Torrentino press to Florence. Simonetti suggests that Cosimo I preferred Torrentino probably because the printer was non-Florentine and his Northern European contacts presented opportunities to Florence and thereby to the Medici court. This suggests, further, that Vasari's own text would reach a public north of the Alps (as it did), further expanding Vasari's renown and the glory of the Medici as patrons of the arts, a dominant theme in the Lives.

Simonetti outlines Vasari's dealings with the printers as well as with his numerous friends who were critical to the completion of the text. At the time the first edition was being printed, Vasari was in Rome seeking the favors of the new pope, Julius III (Vasari's former patron, Giovanni Maria del Monte, had been elevated to the papacy in February 1550). In spite of the anticipated success of the Lives, Vasari was committed to the art of painting and his swift turn to Rome in 1550 was a move to secure a position at the papal court. One gets the impression from reading the letters to Vasari from his friends in Florence — namely, Vincenzio Borghini and Pier Francesco Giambullari, who were checking facts, preparing indices, and otherwise shepherding the manuscript through to its printed completion — that Vasari was pleased to set the Lives aside, if only for a while. Nevertheless, this dated correspondence indicates that Vasari responded promptly to questions raised by Borghini and Giambullari, clearly indicating the author's desire to see his work finalized.

Simonetti's references to the portraits of artists in both editions illuminate Vasari's appreciation of an artist's singular identity, and his descriptions of the frontispieces and the images of Fame and the Arts, rich in symbolic meaning for each edition, add to our understanding of iconography in Vasari's literary and visual productions. Carlo Maria Simonetti's La Vita delle 'Vite' Vasariane: Profilo storico di due edizioni, a welcomed contribution to current scholarship on Vasari, will serve as a critical reference for scholars of the Lives and other humanist texts printed in the sixteenth century.