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Not Just the Tudors
Vasari: Inventor of Artistic Genius
01:04:29
How did an influential book, published 475 years ago, forever shape our notions of the Renaissance and artistic genius?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe. You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.
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- [02:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. On a sultry evening in the heart of Renaissance Italy, two artists, one celebrated for his radiant colors, the other for his brooding, powerful figures, strolled side by side through the winding streets of Florence. To all appearances, they were friends, but by the end of that fateful night and in the centuries that followed, they would be remembered not as comrades, nor even as rivals, but as a murderer and his victim. Their names would echo through time as the protagonists in a shocking tale of betrayal, exposing the sinister underside of artistic genius. According to Giorgio Vasari, the man who invented the very idea of the artist as a solitary genius, Andrea del Castano lured his fellow painter, Domenico Veneziano away from his work under the guise of friendship. Then, driven by a toxic brew of envy and ambition, he smashed in his companion's skull with lumps of lead. And for what reason? Not just jealousy, but the theft of a secret, the mysterious new technique of oil painting recently arrived in Florence. Vasari cast this as the ultimate betrayal. Friendship turned deadly, envy turned fatal. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published exactly 475 years ago, Vasari told this story with chilling detail and theatrical flair, warning of the dangers that envy poses among men of genius. But here's the rub. The murder never happened. In reality, Venziano outlived Del Castagno by four years. The crime was pure invention, crafted by Vasari not as history, but as drama with a purpose. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was seen as manual labor, its practitioners mere craftsmen. But Vasari changed everything. He redefined art as an intellectual pursuit and artists as the recipients of divine genius. Without Vasari, there might be no Leonardo, no Michelangelo, no Raphael as we know them. So why did the father of art history, the man who created our very conception of the Renaissance, fabricate such a tale? Was he a diligent chronicler or a master storyteller? Or both? And how has his intoxicating blend of truth and myth continued to define the way we think about art, artists and genius itself? Because even now, Vasari's influence stretches from the way major museums are curated to the structure of art education, and from the art market's obsession with the masterpiece to the very narratives we construct about creativity, value and legacy. Joining me today is Dr. Noah Charney, an American art historian and novelist internationally known for his work on art crime. He's the co author, with Ingrid Rowland, of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, the Collector of Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which is a riveting exploration of intrigue, scandal and artistic rivalry. It shows how Vasari reshaped the legacy of Western art in the charged political world of Medici, Florence and papal Rome. Together, we'll explore Vasari's lasting legacy as the inventor of art history. We'll ask, what do Vasari's stories, true or false, reveal about the Renaissance, about the power of Narrative and about how we remember greatness. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is Not Just the Tudors From History hit. Dr. Chani, welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
- [06:43]
Riley Herbst
Thank you so much for having me. What a great introduction.
- [06:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, what a great book. Can I begin then by asking you about our main man for today, Giorgio Vasari. What do we know about his early life and education?
- [07:00]
Riley Herbst
So Giorgio Vasari was born in Arezzo, which is about an hour north of Florence in Tuscany in 1511. And his family were probably master potters. That's where he got his surname. And when he was growing up, it was relatively unusual to have an artist, particularly painters, distinguished from other craftsmen. That was something that Vasari's own book will help develop. The idea that we think of painters and sculptors and architects as somehow a level more sophisticated or a higher cultural step than craftsmen like potters or cabinet makers. And so he grew up in a what we would call a working class, but upper middle class environment. And Arezzo was part of the Duchy of Tuscany. So part of his early life would have been apprenticeship. He wasn't so interested in potting, but he did apprentice himself to a stained glass maker. And then he was quite talented as a young man. And he eventually became apprenticed to a painter, but he also studied other art forms. The idea we have today that one must focus on only one thing exclusively and you can't possibly be good at multiple creative endeavors, is a rather modern one. And so he was an excellent architect. He was, he was an excellent painter. But I would say we would give him maybe a B as opposed to an A today, if we're putting him in the grand ranks of painters. And he's best known today not for his artistic work, but for this magnificent multi volume biography that you mentioned, the lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects, which really colors the way that the entire world thinks about art.
- [08:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what would a humanist education have looked like for the young Vasari?
- [08:50]
Riley Herbst
It's a good question. At that point in Europe, only about 10% of the population was literate at all. So one of the things that often have to teach to students when we teach art history today is a visual language of symbols, which was important because most people couldn't read. But there would be some basic things that early humanists would, would read. But this is so early in the humanist revolution that ownership of books would be quite rare and having read widely would have been very rare indeed. That's more the realm of monks who dedicated their lives to creating manuscripts and housing Them. And the humanist revolution was only less than 100 years old. So the idea that there was an excitement in discovering lost texts from the ancient world, particularly in Greek, and then some early Latin text that's still quite fresh and new. So Vasari was literate. He was very capable. He would become a courtier as well as an artist, primarily at the court of Duke Cosimo de Medici. But early on, he would have primarily focused on creative arts. They didn't have the broad humanistic education that we have today. Going to school wasn't anything like it is in the more modern era. He would have focused almost exclusively on the arts. He would have been apprenticed to a painter, lived in their studio effectively like an unpaid intern, and then graduates to a role as an assistant, which is a paid position. And he would have educated himself more in conversation than in reading.
- [10:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And some of those conversations might well have been with Michelangelo. How did he come to know him? And what sort of influence did Michelangelo have on Vasari?
- [10:38]
Riley Herbst
We have this interesting dynamic, especially when you read Vasari's lives, that it really is a book with an agenda. We think of history books as being objective, but of course they very rarely are. And Vasari's primary agenda was to show that Tuscan art was the greatest art that humankind had been capable of producing and that Michelangelo was the greatest artist who ever lived. Now, that's not a bad thing to state because I think there are many who might still agree because Michelangelo excelled at so many different media. But that's really the conclusion one comes to when reading Vasari's lives. And part of that is because he was pro Tuscan, because that was both his birth region, so he was being patriotic. But it was also part of his job because he was the official court painter for the Medici who ruled Tuscany. So he would have encountered Michelangelo because they were both artists working in Florence under the Medici at the same time. Michelangelo was absolutely Vasari's idol. He was the idol of many of the artists at the time. He was very quirky guy, Michelangelo. He didn't have optimal personal hygiene, but that's okay. Fair enough. There's a story that he wore dog skin boots and. And he'd never take them off. And he wore them for so long that they sort of bonded onto his skin, and he couldn't have taken them off if he wanted to. And I don't think he smelled too good. He was very irascible. But, man, what a genius. And Vasari really idolized him and considered him a friend. I'm not quite sure they're friends in the sense that we would have today. But Vasari was absolutely the main hype man for Michelangelo, as with the other artists who based on in Florence. And they had an interesting dynamic in that Vasari preserved and prolonged Michelangelo's legacy. For example, way back when, when I was still a student, I was an intern at Christie's auction house in London, and they sold, I remember a Michelangelo drawing that he probably spent less than an hour doing, and it was for something like £19 million. And Michelangelo, at the end of his life, tried to burn all of his preparatory drawings from throwing them into the fire to try to erase the fact that he spent so much time in preparation for his works. He wanted to give the impression that they just emerged wholly from his genius brain. And Vasari actually physically stopped him and saved many of those individual sheets of paper. And he's the reason we have some of them to this day. Michelangelo also made fun of Vasari. He joked that the Sale de Cento Giorni, which was the rooms of Pope Paul III at the Vatican palace that Vasadi painted. And he claimed, boastfully, that he painted them in a hundred days because that would have been very fast to do a fresco cycle. Michelangelo joked that it looked like he had painted them in only 100 hours because they were so lousy. So they had a funny dynamic. But Vasari really idolized Michelangelo and they got to know each other in the courts of Florence.
- [13:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So how did someone of Vasari's social standing come to be in the Florentine court? And how did he go on to become the architect of the Cathedral of Florence?
- [13:55]
Riley Herbst
So we have a couple of interesting points you bring up. Indeed, his social standing was not of the sort that he could be considered a friend or equal of aristocrats. But we have a tradition dating back to the previous century that artists of particular renown, who also had an elegant and educated bearing, could elevate their personal status through their ability as an artist. So they would be invited to become court painter or court architect, or court poet or philosopher, as the case may be. And therefore they gained a certain level of access to the rulers. In this case, the Medici family. It was first Vasari was invited to become a court artist by Alessandro de Medici. But Alessandro de Medici was murdered by a cousin named Lorenzaccio. And then another cousin of his, Cosimo de Medici, came to power afterwards, and Vasari was his court portraitist. So the proximity to these places of power was due to the fact that they were exceptional Artists and the courts filled their walls with collectibles in different forms, including in human form. So if we think of. It sounds funny to think about, but if you are an aristocrat like Duke Cosa Modici, you can show your power in erudition by surrounding yourself by interesting people as well as interesting objects. So we have a parallel example, Rudolf of Prague, who had a court based in Prague roughly the same time in the 16th century. He invited human, we could say curiosities. That's not the politically correct term today, but people like John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I's magician, was invited to his court. George Giordano Bruno, the philosopher, was invited because of his adept feats of memory, which was sort of like a magic trick he did. He also collected Archimboldo. He invited as a court painter, who made these portraits of people comprised of plants or vegetables. He also had a giant octopus in a tank and a gaggle of penguins wandering around his castle. So the idea that you would surround yourself with things of interest to show your power and erudition, and some of those things of interest were people who became key members of court. So he would have arrived at court as a portraitist, and then through his wit, elegance, while then he would have remained a key power player. Previous to him, we have Jan van Eyck doing this at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy. That's nearly a century earlier, as an early precedent. And then Raphael was, of course, famously handsome and elegant, and his personal charisma and the position it won him at court with the Pope in Florence in Urbino, elevated the status of other artists because they aspired to be like Raphael. So Vasari found himself at a real place of power, and because he had the ear of the ruler, and because these artists were skillful at many media, we think of them as doing one thing, but they actually did a lot of things at an exceptional level. He got various commissions, including he painted the inside of the Cupra of the Duomo. So the building had already been designed by Arnolfo di Cambio a century earlier. And then the dome itself, there's a famous story of Asatti tells about how that was designed, but by the time he got there, he painted the inside of it with a famous Last Judgment scene. And he's famously the architect of the Uffizi, which today we know of as a museum. But uffizi in Italian means offices, and he designed it as literally the offices of. Of the Duchy of Tuscany.
- [17:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we can still see his work. But what do you think about his Experiences as a painter, as an architect, shaped the way that he would go on to write about other artists.
- [17:47]
Riley Herbst
So he's hugely biased. This is why you have to read everything he offers with large pinches of salt. That said, he is probably the single best primary source we have for Florence, Tuscany and Rome in the middle of the 16th century. And so he's required reading in Every Art History 101 course or any courses about Renaissance Italian culture. But we have to understand that it requires many annotations, like the annotation for the Andrea del Castagno in Domenico Veneziano murder story that never happened, with which you opened the episode. There are a lot of these, and you have to do a little bit of research on your own to decide whether his stories were feasible and whether there was a probable ulterior motive. But his bias was quite basic. He was hoping to show that the epitome of art was in Florence in the 16th century, during his lifetime, and that Michelangelo was the zenith of what an artist could be. And part of this was flattering himself, since he was a Tuscan artist. And he followed Michelangelo's style. He was of a movement that is referred to as mannerism, la maniere. It's actually a term that he coined. And it's essentially people who were trying to follow Michelangelo's style that Michelangelo developed in the second half of his career. But it was also a propaganda tool. So he dedicated Lives to Cosimo de Medici. And this is a book that was hugely influential. It was effectively an early modern bestseller, but it's remained so, and it's really colored the way we think of art even to this day. So he had an agenda, and you have to double check all of his stories to make sure they make sense. But part of what he did was create stories that were memorable, and he helped perpetuate a type of biographical history that isn't new to him. We have Plutarch's Lives in the Ancient World or Suetonius's the Lives of the Caesars as examples of, you know, telling someone's life story without just the big battles and coronations, but the juicy bits that are like the naughtiness and who's sleeping with who, and lots of pranks appear. Bad behavior is always fun to read about, especially among people we tend to maybe idealized too much like kings or artists from past eras. And there's a lot of legacies from his book that were byproducts of him effectively creating a piece of propaganda for his ruler, Cosimo de Medici.
- [20:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, Because I suppose that's the other part of it. He's a courtier and a diplomat. So I wonder to what extent we should be reading this lives as a political document, kind of reflecting the ambitions, the anxieties of Medici Florence.
- [20:44]
Riley Herbst
It absolutely can be read in that context. It's particularly clear if you are taking the perspective of the people who are overlooked or the cultures that were overlooked in favor of this incredibly specific propagandistic tool that's pro Florence. So some of the really great artists who we know of and who could have been the focus of parallel book that had been commissioned from someone at a different court, people like Jan van Eyck or Albrecht Durer, barely get a mention. We get an example of his court portraitist who followed him, Bronzino, who's my favorite painter. So I was keeping an eye out for him. He barely gets a mention as well, because while he was a great painter, he was effectively Vasari's rival. And there's an inordinate amount of space in terms of number of words given to Michelangelo. Michelangelo's biography is much longer than any of the others, but Raphael's and Leonardo's are also similarly long. And so he is not really trying to be objective at all. But he's also approaching history in a way that is interesting because this is how historians researched in the past when they didn't have access to archives. So his technique was writing to relatives of artists when he didn't. Sometimes he knew the artists. Many of the artists he wrote about were alive when he was, and he knew them personally. But those who weren't, he would write to their relatives or people who knew them and ask them to reply with stories. And so it's a little bit like the game of telephone, where things can be lost through the various hands. They're passed down. He was writing about artists who were worked really within a century of his own life. So it's not going that far back in time. But anyone with a bone to pick or with airbrushing a story could send him something that, to him feels like a primary source document that he can take as as fact. And if it matches his agenda, then why wouldn't he put it in? And that's why we can get some funny stories like the Castanha one. There's certain villains that Vasari cast, mostly because either he personally didn't like them, like, infamously, Baccio Bandinelli, the poor guy has never recovered from the tarring that he got in Vasari's book, or Castagno and other people he elevated. And it's good that he did, because otherwise we might not have known about them. Like, there's a real quirky character named Bufalmaco who has almost no ext in the paintings, but according to Vasadi, was one of the great characters and an example of missed potential. So a number of his stories are also trying to have a moral conveyed through a life either well lived or that should have been lived better.
- [23:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm struck by the fact that even in the course of this conversation, you've mentioned an anecdote, Michelangelo's Boots, that comes from Vasari. And I'm wondering, therefore, how this blend of fact and anecdote, myth and memory, really in the biographies, challenge our understanding of historical truth in art history.
- [24:02]
Riley Herbst
It's a very good question. And to answer that, I might reference Giordano Bruno, who, who I mentioned earlier in the context of having been invited to the court of Rudolph II of Prague for his feats of memory. And one of the tricks that he used that he would teach people that memory champions even today use, is called the memory palace technique, where he tries to affix to each thing he wants to memorize the most ridiculous, silly or surreal imagery he can come up with. And if you think back on the last book you read, even if you read my book recently, you probably have a certain thing, things that stick out and much of it disappears quickly. And that's. That's a normal part of the reading process. And our memory fixes on to the quirky stories, the unexpected, and Vasadi's book is full of them. But I think he's aware that is what people will remember. So he picks the stories to tell. I don't think he's making up any of them, but he's gathering the sources and he's cherry picking what he's going to convey. And then he probably exaggerates to a certain extent and takes some artistic license, but he's trying to attach moral symbolism to the behavior of different artists. So to give you an example, he wants you to understand that Brunelleschi was all about thinking outside the box. So he's got this great story of how Brunelleschi won the commission to build the dome of Florence's cathedral. So Arnolfo di Cambio created the cathedral. He's the architect of it. He did everything except the dome.
- [25:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And.
- [25:35]
Riley Herbst
But he left the open space for the drum of the dome. And at the time it was going to be the largest dome in the world, and nobody knew how to build it logistically, the Medici had actually reserved an entire forest to fell to make scaffolding for it, because the only thing they could think of is to build this elaborate jungle gym of scaffolding underneath it, which would have been hugely expensive, prohibitively so. And they had a competition to try to have other ideas about how do you build this giant dome. And there was one crazy idea where you fill it with dirt, and you scatter coins amidst the dirt, and you have your workers climb to the top of this mountain of dirt. And then how do you get rid of the dirt? Well, you invite beggars to come in and cart off all the dirt, and they can keep all the coins they find in the midst of it. I'm not sure how politically correct that would be at the time or today, but that's one of the memorable anecdotes. Well, there was a competition held, and Donatello, Brunelleschi, some other big names, all put their concepts in for the competition. And Vasari tells the story that it was when it was Brunelleschi's turn to speak before the board that was judging, he pulled out a marble tile and an egg, and he said, if any of you can balance an egg on a marble tile, then you deserve the commission. And of course, nobody could. It kept rolling off. And then they said, effectively, oh, yeah, let's see you do it. And so he took the egg and he tapped it, cracking it just a little bit on the bottom, and put the cracked bit on the marble tile. And of course it stuck. And they all looked at him and said, oh, I mean, we could have done that, too. And he said, ah, but you didn't. And so the reason for that story is to convey his ingenuity and the concept that he's thinking outside the box and to show his genius. And whether or not that story happened, I hope it happened, because what a great story. But we don't know. But we have to understand, take a step back and say, okay, why is he telling us this story? What's his point?
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And his point is artistic genius.
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Riley Herbst
His point is exactly. Artistic genius thinking outside the box, coming up with new ways to do things. And this is part of the context where he tells a story of this wonderful gap year that I would have loved to tag along on, where Brunelleschi and Donatello spent two years hanging out in Rome, eating lots of pasta, drinking, doing whatever you do. And this is at a time when Rome was a mixture of city and ruins, and they were exploring the ruins, and Donatello was looking at literally broken bits of sculpture that he could see inside to relearn the sculpture techniques of ancient Rome that were lost when Rome was conquered and effectively destroyed. And Brunellecki was doing the same thing with architecture. So he was seeing ruined broken bits of ancient domes. And he saw how the ancients created their domes, various techniques like coffered ceilings and herringbone brick patterns that are self supporting and internal buttresses. And he used that information to build the dome of Florence's cathedral. So this is about artistic genius. And as you mention it, it leads us maybe to the next point where we largely have Vasari to thank for the concept that artists are lone geniuses who create their work wholesale, from scratch without any help, as the like fruit of their ingenuity, when in real life it almost never happens like that.
- [29:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting, isn't it? So they're solo individuals. And he's also distinguishing, as you said earlier, between art and what was merely in his eyes, craft.
- [29:23]
Riley Herbst
That's right. He would have liked the idea that craftspeople could also be elevated because that would mean that his family was more highborn than they had previous been thought as a family of potters. But he was also aware that the individual charisma of a great artist can help the entire field. So really, Raphael is largely to thank for the fact that in Italy, painters were considered a level above other craftsmen and a step below nobility. But the nobility of what they could create really elevated their status. And that wasn't the case across Europe. If we look even a century later to the golden age of Spanish painting, Diego Velazquez was obliged to dismiss his own paintings as merely a hobby because it just wasn't considered sufficiently sophisticated to be a painter. And he effectively, from our perspective, wasted a lot of time as a courtier when he could have been painting, would rather been painting because painters were dismissed as mere craftsmen. So it was much more advanced in Italy. And that's initially thanks to Raphael and then thanks to Vasari's presentation of people like Raphael as elevating them to effectively a rock star status. They were like the rock stars of the period, collected, recruited by the leading courtiers, Francois Premier, the King of France, at the same time Vasari was living, literally tried to recruit artists and he got some of them. Michelangelo and Raphael passed on his offer, but Benvenuto, Cellini, Rosso Fiorentino, even Leonardo da Vinci, at the end of his life, accepted his patronage. And it's maybe a little bit like free agents in a sport, moving to a different football team, for example. And that cult of interest in artists for whatever they create is largely down to Vasari. And Francois Premier is an example. He wanted any work by an artist he admired. Now, today, that sounds kind of normal if you want to have a Damien Hirst or a Banksy because you like them. But back then, you would commission a work of art because of the subject matter and the location you'd want to commission it for. And you decide who you wanted to make it. But you wouldn't want anything by Raphael. You'd want a very specific thing. I want an Annunciation painting for this church that's dedicated to my family. And Vasari developed this fascination with collecting anything made by this genius hand. And one of my favorite stories, because I'm interested in lost art, is a great lost art collection that was Vasadi's own. So he collected what he called the Libri de di Segni, which was at least 12 large folio volumes. And he would collect the drawings of artists he admired, including almost everyone who is referenced in his lives. And this is at a time when drawings were not collectible at all. Drawings were thought of maybe blueprints for a house. You're going to keep the house, but you're not necessarily going to keep the blueprints. In this case, the house would be a final sculpture or oil painting. But the drawings he had valued, and he pasted them into these giant folio books, and it was like a portable museum before the concept of museums that we have today, which again is the fruit of Vasadi's book, really came into being. And so he had this portable museum. And then in the margins around the drawings he collected by these artists he admired, he would make drawings in the style of the artist in question. And he and Francois Premier were probably the first two groupies who would collect anything by the artist they admired. And that has launched a trend that still continues very much to this day.
- [33:17]
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- [34:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so fascinating, isn't it? When you were describing that process of commissioning art before this kind of cult of genius, it sounds a bit like asking for quotes for doing building work. You know, just get some quotes from three builders and choose the cheapest or maybe the middle one if you're feeling sort of moderate. But in other words, we're seeing a complete shift culturally and economically when it comes to art. As a response to Vasari's idea and of other people embracing it, that's almost right.
- [35:29]
Riley Herbst
What I would say is that they would intentionally choose the contractor that has the biggest name, if you can afford it, because choosing the one with the biggest name is the way that you show off. So imagine, let's say if you're incredibly wealthy and you want to build a new house, then maybe you're going to ask for quotes from four or five celebrity architects and then you're going to make a whole meal of the fact that you're going to pick this one because this is the one you like best and speaks to you and that becomes part of your legacy is the fact that you're working with someone that high level. I think you're right. When you get to probably 99% of all the artwork that was ever commissioned, that's the 99%. That's what we tend to ignore because it's sort of not sexy. We focus on the 1% of these. A level artists who revolutionize something, changed the world were written about where influential started a movement themselves. So I think 99% are there. It's like a contractor for a normal person. You, there are a couple of people you like, you're going to see examples of their work and you're going to pick which one suits you and suits your budget. But when we're talking about these big levels, you know, dukes and kings, then they're going to opt for the person who's the most famous, who's going to bring the most renown to them because it's a status symbol. It's the way, you know, today people might buy a giant yacht as a status symbol or might buy a football team as a status symbol. Here you would commission an artist and show off by the fact that you can afford such an artist. And part of it is that you are intelligent enough to appreciate them and you can interact with and interpret the work that they're commissioning. That's a thing that we've sort of forgotten, but there was a pleasure in showing off to your peers, discussing works of art in your collection or that you commissioned for public display and pointing out details that maybe someone wouldn't notice, or understanding the symbolism and that the art was there to be interacted with in an intellectual way that not just looked at passively as beautiful or not.
- [37:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's come on to the discipline of art history. Did it simply not exist before Vasari? How does his focus on biographical accounts of individual masters shape the way we continue to think about the discipline?
- [37:52]
Riley Herbst
Vasari is often described as the godfather of art history, and that's absolutely correct. So he's not the first person to write about art, but there's a lot of superlatives with his lives. So there's ancient writings about art. Certainly we have people like Pliny and Scribo going back even further, you can find ancient sources describing works of art. There's a term ekphrasis, a Greek term for a poet describing a work of art and in describing it, trying to actually do it one better to show you that poetry is the preferred art form. Boris writes about it. So there are ancient examples, but what does Vasadi do that's different and distinctive? So Vasadi's Lives has some key points that we think of today as normal, but didn't really exist before his time. So one is that we can categorize artists based on the region they were working in. So geographical, their own lineage as an artist, so who they were taught by and who apprenticed to them. And then we have this concept of styles that grows out of that. So his main concept and the sort of rivalry he sets up is between the Florentine school and the Venetian school. Now, there are others that he mentions, but the shorthand is that he talks about Florentine as superior, and it's based on disenho, which is the word for drawing, sketching. And whereas Venetian is based on colore or color. So the very basic way to Think of it is the Venetian approach is you apply color directly to your canvas. And the Florentine approach is you make preparatory drawings. You also make drawings on the canvas itself. And so it's more line based. And then you're filling it in with color. And he has this big rivalry set up. And of course, there was a rivalry between Florence and the Republic of Venice. If you called Titian Italian painter, he would be very confused because at the time, Italy was just a bunch of city states. It wasn't until the 19th century that it was a country. And Venice was certainly a distinct place. And they did have their own distinct style. But that idea of comparing different styles side by side, comparing one artist to another, talking about their personal as well as professional rivalries, that's something that is normal today and didn't really exist before. We also have the idea of how you even curate a museum. Museums as we think of it today didn't really exist prior to that time. A contemporary of Vasari's name, Paolo Giovio, is the person who coined the term museum. It was a place where the muses gathered. He built one that was effectively like a cabinet of curiosities at his villa in the north of Italy. And Vasari created a museum too. That Libri de di Segni was effectively a port affordable art museum showing the evolution of art. And his goal to show that the evolution of art was from less naturalistic, moving towards Michelangelo as the best ever. That concept has been a little bit difficult to slake off because most people would probably say, well, artists tried to be more photorealistic until they could be photorealistic. Then photos took over and then they became more abstract. That's a simplification that's only part way. True. But we have Vasari to thank for that as well. We also have that over focus on Florentine art. I say over focus because of the popularity of Vasari's lives, particularly in English translation in England in the 19th century, helped develop this fascination with Tuscany and Florence among Anglophones. And people tend to overlook other locations that created equally wonderful art because it wasn't part of Vasari's agenda. And Vasari was hugely influential among the Anglophone world because of the popularity of his translation into English, of his lives.
- [41:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Going back to that idea of the museum. And also the. In this case, I suppose if we've got Vasari elevating drawing or design as the basis of great art, and then from that we get this sort of sense of the three major arts, painting and sculpture, as architecture influencing Museums, to what extent do you think these things are still sort of foundational in how museums are structured or the study of art history is approached today?
- [42:25]
Riley Herbst
They're absolutely foundational. They're still the way we approach the study of art, in part because it's easiest to wrap your head around. So the idea of a lineage, the way we might study the Habsburgs as a series, this person ruled and then their descendant took over, and then the descendant took over. We have this lineage of artists working with previous artists continuing or veering away from the style that they learned with. The idea of museums curated by period, style or region is still absolutely the case today. And there's a very specific reason for this. So the spread of Vasari's influence through translations of his book. So he wrote his book in Italian, in the vernacular, in the Tuscan dialect, which is unusual a little bit because at the time if you were writing something of import, you would have written in Latin. And so his idea was to popularize this. He wasn't wanting to speak only to the hyper educated peers. He was wanting to spread the word of the story of art. It got picked up in England in the 19th century and in France even earlier. And the biggest influencer among museum directors was Dominique Vivant Dunant, who was the first director of the Louvre. He was Napoleon's art advisor and he was given the assignment of running the Louvre when Napoleon had it changed from the royal residence of the French royal family in Paris into an art museum. And his decision on how to curate and display works from the French royal collection in that museum influenced all the other museums that would follow. The Louvre wasn't the first museum. Actually, the first museum was the armory at the Tower of London. And we have the Belvedere palace as another early one in Vienna, but it was the most influential. So we have this chain of influence. Vasari's lives, then the French translation influencing Dunant in how he structures the first universal and high profile museum. Even down to the fact where he got from Vasari the idea that if you have a doorway between two rooms that you want to frame a painting so it's hung and appears to be in the middle of the doorway when you look through the passage from one room into another, even down to that, he got inspiration from Vasari and the Louvre then influenced other museums. So we have this chain of influence and its spread when key influencers, it's funny to use that term today, but influences existed in past eras as well, were picking up on Vasadi's cues and then Developing them.
- [45:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's so fascinating. And that is making me think into 17th century Dutch art, where that kind of picture seen through doorways has become part of art itself. And also, I was really struck by what you were saying earlier about elevating the importance of painting. I spend a lot of time thinking about Henry VIII's court at a period in which tapestry was far more valuable than painting. And obviously Holbein arrives and people now struggle with the idea that he wouldn't have been seen as particularly great as an artist by comparison to the tapestry makers, even though everyone thinks he's wonderful. And this way that now tapestry and armor and all of these forms of art of the period, which were so highly prized, are much less prized. And Vasari seems to be behind it all. I mean, is that right?
- [46:02]
Riley Herbst
So the concept that Vasari helped develop was. Has been true occasionally, but is a little bit misleading is the idea that an artist is a lone genius. And this is to answer your question, Tapestries were designed by lone geniuses usually, but made by a team collectively. And the person who made the design for the tapestry was rarely actually involved in the weaving part of it. It's easier to wrap your head around a single name who you're going to admire. And if the idea is that they made everything from start to finish, that feels more appropriate to our concept of what a genius does. That said, most artists throughout history in the European tradition would run studios and the studio would have a specific number of people working for it that was usually designated by the local guild. Painters guilds were called the Guild of St. Luke because it was a patron saint of painters. And in many places, the maximum number of people who could work in a studio was 14, depended on the region. And that would include unpaid apprentices who might be as young as 8 years old and as old as 16, and then paid assistants who would be from 16 on. And everything produced by the studio was by the master. But the master, depending on how much you paid them, may or may not be involved with all aspects of the creation of the work. So you pay the maximum amount. And let's say Raphael would paint every aspect of the painting and design it, and you pay the minimum amount. Raphael would design the work and oversee it, but he wouldn't actually touch it himself. And in practice, there were usually a sliding scale, but artists would design, oversee, and usually handle faces and hands, which are considered the most difficult to do. But backgrounds, still lifes, landscapes would usually be assigned to other people. And so it was a team effort. But everything that emerged from that studio was by the headlining master. And today people get very upset if they learn that, like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons has a team of people working for them who are actually making the art that is said to be by them. But in fact, that's part of a tradition. That said, Vasari kind of glossed over this whole it's called the Bottega system, the whole studio Bottega system, because he was interested in the individuals and their stories and their quirks and their genius. And so if you read Vasadi's lives, you could easily think that the Bottega system wasn't in place. And there are moments in art history and individuals who did work solo in the Romantic era. This became more common in the 19th century, especially when you get the rise of academies. People are employing assistants, but maybe one or two at a time. They don't have these big studios. So it became true. But Vasari was largely responsible for that concept. So that's the long answer to your question. I think it's easier to wrap your head around a single person who's the great genius than a team of too many names to keep track of who are responsible for creating an object like a tapestry.
- [49:16]
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- [50:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So perhaps it's a bit like an auteur of a film today. It's a great director, and yet we know there's actually a thousand people who make that film.
- [50:37]
Riley Herbst
That's exactly right.
- [50:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I'm also struck by the fact that the Bottega system is challenging even today for museums who want their particular painting to be by the master. But sometimes we look at them and think it's certainly not him at his best, is it? But it couldn't possibly be downgraded to workshop of. Because it suddenly would drop in value by millions. So I wonder if that's going on. And the other thing about this solo genius question. Am I right in thinking that the idea of the solo genius as possibly being kind of miserable and depressive as he portrays Michelangelo comes from Rosario as well?
- [51:21]
Riley Herbst
Yeah, that is part of the story. The kind of brooding genius who is holding his head in his hands from the weight of intellectuality and greatness and melancholy that comes with it. He's not the first one to talk about that or depict it. The idea that there's a link between an abundance of. They were called the humors. So basically the concept that the body has this balance or imbalance of fluids. And that too much of one leads to melancholy, which we would call depression today. But it sort of was thought of more complicated and broader than that. And that it was associated with artistic genius. I think that is part of it. But then the concept of the brooding artists wearing a black beret and drinking absinthe and smoking in their Paris attic, that comes much later, of course. And we have a balance between Michelangelo's brooding and Raphael's absolute elegance. So there are multiple prototypes. But Vasari plays them up and tries to accentuate them, I think for melodrama and because he has this thing where there's three books in his lives and each one has a protagonist and a sort of antagonist. And the antagonist never recovered from the reputation that he dealt out to them. And he couldn't say enough good things about the protagonists. And they have different characters. But the idea that there are extremities of personality that go with extremely great creativity. That's absolutely the case.
- [52:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Did he actually coin the term Renaissance or Renaissance? I aware that as speakers of English we are divided on this. But did he coin its Italian counterpart at least?
- [53:04]
Riley Herbst
He coined a number of terms. I'm not sure that we can give him the prize of coining it in a way that it became universal. But the term is renascimento, which is a rebirth. And it refers to a rebirth or renewal of interest in the. The classical world. And that was already in place by the time he was writing. So with the rediscovery of ancient, particularly Greek, manuscripts like Lucretius, on the nature of things in Plato and Aristotle, by scholars who were hunting for them mostly in monasteries that almost accidentally had individual copies of them survive from antiquity, that was basically a generation before Vasari was born. But he does use the term. I'm not sure if we can credit him with coining it, but he certainly used it. He does coin the term la maniera, which gives us the term mannerism. We also have some other terms that I think are useful, because I always teach it when I teach art history, and maybe it's useful for your listeners. There are two terms Vasari uses to describe what makes for a great work of art, and one is inventione. So in this context can mean drawing or design, but in practice, it means the physical ability to execute your concept. So if my concept is a stick figure and I can execute it, that's fine. If my concept is something that's more realistic and elaborate, then I need to be able to physically pull it off. And its counterpart is inventione. Inventione literally means invention or inventiveness. But it's the ability to conceive of something that's new and interesting and plays around with other traditional depictions of the same scene and does it with originality. And in order to be a great artist, you have to excel at both. Now, you can go to art school or learn from Paint by Numbers, and you can get good at disegno, although, of course, some people are naturally more talented than others. But what you can't really teach someone is inventione. But if you close your eyes and think of a battle scene, that battle scene that you came up with, that's your inventione. We can all come up with it. The question is, could you actually make a painting of it or sculpt it? And I certainly couldn't. But that distinction of those two elements is something that I think we can attribute to Vasadi, because this is how he describes it. And I like to ask students to think in terms when they encounter a work of art. Is the inventione interesting? And you often need to know how to put this work in the context of other works of the same subject or in the same period. And then the. It's a little bit about how much you personally like it. Do you find it beautiful? But you can also see, does it exhibit artistic skill? It gets more complicated when you get to abstraction, of course, because the disegno isn't always that difficult to pull off. And then the question, is it interesting? And that's inventione based on. But we have all this to thank Vasari for.
- [56:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So interesting. So then when we get to abstraction, we're asking, is the inventione sufficient for us to not care so much about.
- [56:12]
Riley Herbst
The disegno that's exactly right.
- [56:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Also in terms of things that Vasari was influential in creating our way of thinking about things. How did his tripartite division of art history and sort of, by extension, history into three epochs continue to influence historical, artistic, critical approaches to art?
- [56:39]
Riley Herbst
Well, he talks about three eras that today we think of. In terms of periods of the Renaissance, we would say the Proto Renaissance, the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance. Although at least that's what I was taught a million years ago when I was in art history class and still teach today. So in the Proto Renaissance, his hero is Giotto. In the Early Renaissance era, his heroes are Donatello and Brunelleschi, primarily. And in the High Renaissance, his hero is Michelangelo, although Leonardo and Raphael and also Titian. He has to give some credit, even if Titian might be Venetian, that he's pretty good as well. So there's a couple of things going on here. One is everything is built around artists who worked in Florence. So that's the hub. He's largely ignoring or sidelining or just mentioning briefly the truly great artists. You know, if you were going to make your top top 10 list, you can't possibly leave out Albrecht Durer if you're talking about Leonardo. And he almost gets no mention at all. So he's got this pro Florence, then. Each of the books has a protagonist and an antagonist, and he likes to have setups of professional and artistic rivalries, but also personal. Then each section is moving forward towards the epitome of what art can be, which he's predetermined. It's Michelangelo's work in Florence. That's as good as it gets. So we understand that it's working towards that agenda, which is functioning under hypothesis bias. But most texts are particularly ancient texts. Before they had a concept for hypothesis bias, there was usually an agenda behind any work of literature because they were written for people dedicated to people who were either paying for them or would do a favor for the person who created them. So they're basically all created with an agenda. And you have to read them by trying to remove the agenda bits to see how much of it feels like it's still authentically the case. If you peel back everything that feels like there was probably an external reason for him to add things in. And then you have the personal rivalries too, and you have to keep that in mind. These are humans writing about other humans, and he has plenty of bones to pick. And he doesn't like Baccio Bandinelli one bit, for example. And so he's going to throw all of this shade on Bondinelli, whether or not he deserved it, if we're looking objectively in history.
- [59:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that Florentine focus is particularly present in the book itself, first published 475 years ago, but it is then expanded and republished 18 years later. And that's when we start to see changes made by him. What changes are made at that point in time.
- [59:28]
Riley Herbst
So he expands the book in 1568, but one of the main things he does is he adds details about artists who have died since the first edition. So he can basically go at people who he didn't want to have sue him or punch him in the nose when he's walking past them in Florence. So he adds some of the more scandalous bits about artists who had passed away by the time that edition came out. He also got more information. Of course, Michelangelo's legacy was something that he was always collecting and he was writing to relatives and asking for more stories. So it's much expanded. He includes some more of the artists who are not based in Florence, tipping his hat to them, but making sure they don't steal the show. One thing that's great that he does, I have a whole book about the story of women in art called Brushed Aside. And we have Vasari to thank for having many stories related to women in art who might otherwise have been overlooked, because he did add a chapter on them. And he names some wonderful artists, like Portia de Rossi or Sofonisbar Anguissola, who's one of my favorites, who I probably would never have heard about. And many of us would have overlooked her had he not sung her praises. Now he sings praises of women in what sounds very misogynist way. He would write like, she paints so well, you'd think she was a man, which sounds dreadful today, but this was high praise in 16th century Italy. You have to take my word for it. So he had more material by that time, and he had more people who he had knives out for, who he could attack because they were no longer going to fight back. And that's the edition that was most widely translated, and it's still full of biases and errors. So when you have to read it, you have to read an annotated edition. But it's one of these things where we're very grateful as historians for any primary source documentation that is rich and deep. And this is absolute gold for historians. You just have to understand how to read it in a way that tries to strip away the biases inherent in the text.
- [61:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Noah has Vasari left us a legacy that helps us understand art that is no longer with us.
- [61:39]
Riley Herbst
He has. I have a whole book called the Museum of Lost Art, which is about works that, when they existed, were more important than the ones that happened to have survived the centuries, but for various reasons, they've been lost. And Vasari is like this sort of Da Vinci Code lever of clues in a really engaging way. And one of the works that he has led us to hopefully discover in the near future. I say that in the conditional is a great lost wall painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was commissioned as part of an artistic duel that was planned between Michelangelo and Leonardo to create rival battle scenes, frescoes on the enormous walls of what's called the Sala DEI Cinquecent, the Hall of five hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. And the idea was to have a literal duel. You would walk into this grand meeting room, you would meet with the Medicis who were ruling the city, and they would point out the different artists and you would decide which one you liked better. Well, Leonardo began but never finished, what's called Battle of Anghiari. Michelangelo never actually got started because he thought he got a bad deal. He thought that his side of the room had worse lighting and he was not going to look good. So he never accepted his part of the commission. But if we fast forward a bit, Leonardo began but didn't finish this battle scene. He also used some funny materials for it that meant it was deteriorating shortly after he finished it, and he was called away to do other work and never returned. If we fast forward a bit. When Cosimo de Medici came to power, he commissioned Vasari to renovate the Palazzo Vecchio as part of his renovation in the 1560s and 70s. That included building the Uffizi and also an escape passage so that the Medici could escape from Palazzo Vecchio to their other palace, Palazzo Pitti, if they ever needed to. And as part of this commission, he had to redesign and reshape the Sala de Cinquecento. Now, in that enormous room, Fesari was also commissioned to create huge frescoes of battle scenes. It's enormous. It's like the size of a basketball court. And in all of that space, there are only a few words that Vasadi wrote. And they're hidden on a battle flag far up high, so you can't even see it from the ground. And it says cerca trova, Seek and you will find. And scholars believe that he was such a fan of Leonardo that he would never have willingly destroyed a Leonardo painting in order to renovate the room. But they believe that he created a false wall over the Leonardo painting in order to fulfill his commission without actually damaging the work. There's a precedent for this. Earlier Vasari was asked to renovate the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and part of his renovation would have destroyed a famous fresco by Masaccio called the Holy Trinity, which is one of the most influential paintings ever made. It's taught in all our Art History 101 courses. And in the 19th century, during another renovation, a false wall was discovered and the painting was hidden behind it. So we have Vasari to thank that it survived, and we believe that he did the same thing for the Leonardo. And there were investigations undertaken by my colleague Maurizio Seracini, who drilled holes around the Vasari fresco without actually puncturing the fresco itself and put in little holes, you know, probe, so that he could see what's behind it. And there's a 4 centimeter gap behind only the part of the wall that says Cerca trova on it. And pigment samples that match pigments used by Leonardo were found on that back wall. And then everything stopped because of Italian bureaucracy. And it's still on pause about 20 years later. But it's a real life Da Vinci Code Indiana Jones treasure hunt that Vasati left for us. And I hope that we get the punchline at some point, because I'd be very curious to see what's behind that wall.
- [65:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Oh, my goodness. How amazing. How incredible. Please let that move forward. Thank you so much for telling us that story. That is fabulous.
- [65:51]
Riley Herbst
No problem. If we can work on the Italian bureaucracy, we'll come back for a special episode whenever they reveal what was behind the wall.
- [65:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. And we'll be there looking at it. So you've given us a bit of a sense of him as a writer and how reliable it is or not as a historical source. This way, in which it needs to be read, as so many documents of the period do need to be done. But I want to ask you one last question. If we were to summarize how Vasari's work has influenced art, how we value art today, how we have the concept of a masterpiece, what would you say?
- [66:31]
Riley Herbst
I think the easiest way to understand Vasadi's influence is the fact that we teach art and think about art in terms of movements, geographies, styles and chains of influence of one artist to another. That our default assumption when we think of a great artistic location is Florence circa 1500, and that we think of the greatest of all artists as the Ninja Turtles, which I'm not sure how popular this was in the UK when I was growing up in the US this was.
- [67:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It was so popular.
- [67:08]
Riley Herbst
Okay, okay, fair enough. So the fun quiz question that all of your listeners are going to know the answer to, but which of the four Ninja Turtles is anachronistic to the others? So we have Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Donatello. Donatello. Very good. Full credit. So Donatello's a generation before the others. The fourth Ninja Turtle should be Titian, but we'll leave that aside for now. But this idea that those are the greatest artists ever. If you ask almost anyone in the world to name three, four artists, those are likely the ones they would maybe these days Picasso would be added in and but that's really considered the epitome of art. And there's an argument to be made that Michelangelo was the greatest of all artists. I think that's reasonable to say. But our benevolent hyper prejudice towards Florentine art and those artists in particular, and the idea that the High Renaissance was as good as it gets. I prefer mannerism. I prefer the next generation, if I may say so. But that's down to Vasadi. And then anytime you go to a museum, the way it's curated, the way it's displayed, the way the artists are written about, the way we want to know about the artist as a personality rather than just looking at the art in a vacuum, that's all down to Vasadi.
- [68:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Dr. Nerijani, thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy to talk about this. So illuminating and so enjoyable.
- [68:31]
Riley Herbst
Thank you so much for having me.
- [68:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintour, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetudorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit.
- [69:12]
Riley Herbst
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- [69:21]
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