Review by New York Times Review
IT IS RARE that a biographer of artists becomes the subject of a biography. You don't think of biographers as romantic figures or swashbuckling types, and their lives are not generally momentous. Unlike artists, who are almost professionally obliged to spread their emotions dazzlingly wide, biographers need to be organized and neat. They go around collecting the scraps left behind - letters, diary notes, apartment leases - while lamenting the inevitable gaps in the documentation surrounding most any life. Giorgio Vasari did all this, but he did it before anyone else, arguably inventing the field of art history. His life was as remarkable as that of any of those Renaissance masters whose adventures he chronicled. Although the vignettes he related were notoriously untrustworthy, you can choose to be generous and contemplate the thousands of facts and critical opinions he managed to get right. Ingrid Rowland, a prominent scholar of Renaissance art and history, and her fellow writer and historian Noah Charney, wear their erudition lightly in their gracefully written biography, "The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art." Born in 1511 in the town of Arezzo, which is southeast of Florence, Vasari was esteemed during his lifetime as a painter and an architect who worked for the mighty Medici clan. Officially, he was a Mannerist painter, which was like being in a place where the sun is always going down. It was his fate to work in the aftermath of the High Renaissance, to visit the Vatican and look up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling and know that the contest wasn't close. Contemporary artists had no chance of matching the accomplishments of the past. As a painter, Vasari was solidly average. But he did possess a talent for admiration. The same habit of reverence that doomed his artwork to bland imitation served him well as a biographer. His magnum opus, "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," was published in 1550, when Vasari was in his late 30s. It offers a group portrait of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, starting with Cimabue in the 13th century and culminating 300 years later with Michelangelo, who was Vasari's oftdeclared favorite and also his friend. Once, in an act of biographical overtime, Vasari braved a crowd of anti-Medici rioters to rescue an arm of Michelangelo's statue "David," which lay broken on the ground in three pieces, the casualty of a hurled bench. Or so Vasari recounts in his "Lives." He was capable of narrative embellishment when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic. Rowland and Charney are fully cognizant of his flaws. They acknowledge that "much of his information is wrong, sometimes by his own deliberate choice." They bemoan his frequent use of unnamed sources. One of his favorite phrases was scrivono alcurti, which means "some write." Who was "some"? They must have had Deep Throats in the Renaissance, too. Astoundingly, as Rowland and Charney make clear, no one before Vasari had written a series of artist biographies. There were lives of poets, lives of philosophers; there were rollicking lives of depraved rulers of the Roman Empire. But those subjects belonged to the upper classes. Artists, by contrast, were regarded in much the same way as cobblers or blacksmiths - manually skilled but with limited formal education, mainly because their learning took place from an early age in bustling workshops. Vasari, on the other hand, had studied Latin in his youth and could recite passages of Virgil from memory. He was uncharacteristically literate for his time and superbly qualified to write his "Lives." If some of his stories are hyperbolic, and he did like to gush, he should be credited for having elevated the prestige of both artists and art. His achievement was to show how a work of art, unlike a cobbler's boot, is not just the product of manual dexterity but of a singular personality that imposes its own sensibility and rules. Among his bestknown anecdotes is that of Giotto, who in 1304 won an important commission in Rome by demonstrating his skill in less than one minute. He painted a perfect O in red without moving his arms or using a compass. Apparently, he just rotated his hand, in a gesture of stunning conceptual elegance. What do we know of Vasari's own origins? He was descended from generations of potters, and the name Vasari derives from vasaio, the Italian for "potter." Spurning the vocation of his father and his grandfather, the young Giorgio took his inspiration from his great-uncle Luca Signorelli, a well-known Florentine artist who nurtured his interest in drawing. "Learn, little kinsman," Signorelli sweetly exhorted the boy. As his schoolmates played outdoors, Giorgio would sit sketching inside the cool, quiet space of churches, which is where you went in 1520 if you wanted to contemplate top-flight examples of painting and sculpture. IN HIS OWN telling, Vasari characterizes himself as a frail child who suffered from chronic nosebleeds. His great-uncle Luca proved useful in this area, too. He tried to stanch the boy's bleeding with stones reputed to have healing powers. As Vasari recounts, after Luca heard that "my nose bled so copiously that I sometimes collapsed, he held a piece of red jasper to my neck with infinite tenderness." Vasari's mother is treated by the authors with puzzling dismissiveness. When we meet Maddalena Tacci, we are told nothing about her, only that Vasari once joked that she gave birth to another child "every nine months." Today, such a joke does not register as funny, and it would have behooved the authors to tell us how many children Maddalena had, or where Giorgio figured in the birth order (in fact he was the firstborn son). In 1527, when Vasari was 16 and studying in Florence, he learned that his father died of the plague that had descended on his hometown. A few years later, when he was living in Bologna, Vasari decided to return home to Arezzo because he was "worried about how his brothers and sisters were faring without their parents," as the authors write. Yet his mother was still alive then. She outlived her husband by three decades, dying in 1558, according to standard reference books, such as the Grove Dictionary of Art. It is a little strange, in a biography of this quality, to find the mother of the protagonist rubbed out, as in one of those Disney films in which the moms are killed off at the outset in the interest of dramatizing the embattled status of the hero. As such an oversight might suggest, the biography as a whole settles for breeziness and even glibness when close analysis is needed. The missing information about Vasari's family life is unsettling precisely because Vasari tended to view artists as if they made up a big Italian family. By connecting artists whose lives spanned three centuries, he produced one of the first books to insist on the continuity of art. Long before Harold Bloom advanced his theory about the "anxiety of influence," Vasari recognized that the struggle for artistic excellence pits living artists against the most formidable precursors. It took an audacious leap for Vasari to see himself as the defining chronicler of his era, the preserver of life stories, the collector of paper scraps. You might say, based on his recollections of his sickly childhood, that he began life as a sensitive boy alert to the threat of physical extinction. In his work, he attached himself imaginatively to a family that would never die - the family of art history, in which he continues to hold a place of pride as its industrious and chatty paterfamilias. ? He was capable of narrative embellishment when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic. DEBORAH SOLOMON, the art critic of WNYC Public Radio, is currently at work on a biography of the artist Jasper Johns.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Art historians Rowland and Charney lure readers in with a mystery of Dan Brown proportions, but this one about a Leonardo da Vinci painting that may be hidden beneath the frescoes Giorgio Vasari painted on the walls of a Florentine palace is real. Suspense gives way to a biography of Vasari, a Renaissance painter better known as a biographer who originated the field of art history by writing about his compatriots in the oft-cited Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Rowland and Charney interweave the story of Vasari's own life with their accounts of the artists he wrote about within a wider look at the politics and culture of sixteenth-century Italy. Events like the Sack of Rome, in 1527, and the Game of Thrones-esque murder of Alessandro de Medici make for an exciting read. But Rowland and Charney are at their best when explaining the workings of the sixteenth-century art world, from the patronage system to the period propensity for copying masterpieces to the importance of disegno (drawing) to the market for pigments imported along the Silk Road.--Taft, Maggie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The life and times of a true Renaissance man who knew everyoneand immortalized them forever.Art history, by general consensus, began the day an Italian painter named Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) set out to write a subjective yet deeply informed series of sketches of all the major and minor players in Italian art up to his time. The result was The Lives of Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a foundational text that would establish a pantheon of greatness for centuries to come. In this absorbing and well-researched biography, two experienced art historiansRowland (Art, Architecture, and Classics/Univ. of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway; From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town, 2014, etc.) and Charney (The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers, 2015, etc.)map out the endlessly industrious life of one of the original gatekeepers of Western civilization. Although a superb painter who never lacked for work, Vasari regarded himself as minor league. He knew what greatness was and devoted his literary life to explaining it, using Michelangelo, his hero and friend, da Vinci, Titian, Giotto, Cellini, and dozens of others as examples, both pro and con. Vasari set standards by which some artists would live forever and others (not always fairly) would be cast into outer darkness. He was also an early celebrity journalist, although his subjects weren't famous. In Vasari's day, the authors write, artists were "mostly manual workers with a spotty education and intensive technical training; by conventional standards, the meanness of their hardscrabble, hardworking lives could hold no interest for aristocratic writers and readers." Vasari not only made them interesting; he made them gods. Although his facts were sometimes wrong and judgments flawed, he helped create the idea of Art with a capital A. Rowland and Charney do more than deliver a richly detailed life of this singular Renaissance figure. They raise intriguing questions about how tastes and standards develop. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
