Book Review: The Collector of Lives
/The Collector of Lives:
Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Artby Ingrid Rowland and Noah CharneyWW Norton, 2017Both the reading world and the art world know Vasari's 1550 masterpiece (and its second edition) The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, popularly known as his Lives of the Artists, as both a pillar of art history and a bottomless quarry of historical information about the Renaissance world of such famous figures as Giotto, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, art historians Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney reverse the biographical focus and turn it onto the biographer himself, telling Vasari's life in almost novelistic color and detail and opening up that story to include the broader 16th century world of the high Renaissance.Though undeniably magnetic, that world was also grubby and grasping, full of hucksters and strivers, and our authors portray it wonderfully, carefully inserting their hero into the workaday world he himself so often neglected in his artist profiles – even when, as is often the case, Vasari is upstaged by louder egos:
Curial positions ... were just what they seem to be: sinecures to be given as a gift to friends. No fewer than four of the artists in the Medici entourage applied to be the “friar of lead.” In addition to the young Vasari, only twenty, the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, eleven years older, also applied – but [Pope] Clement knew Cellini too well to consider him for the job, “The place you ask for is worth eight hundred scudi a year,” the pope informed the sculptor, “so that were I to give it to you, you would never do any work, but spend your days in idleness, pampering your body.” To this, the bombastic and witty Cellini replied, “A really good cat mouses better on a full stomach.”
Vasari the artist lives in these pages, rubbing shoulders with some of the giants whose lives he would go on to chronicle, and our authors follow the energetic, ambitious young Vasari through the various stages of his career and his dealings with powerful patrons like the Medici family. The book is minutely researched, and Rowland and Charney always have the perfect quote on hand to flesh out some crucial moment in Vasari's life, like the friendly nudge that woke him from the spell cast upon him by his visit to Venice in 1542:
His reception in Venice – the proliferation of friends and steady flow of commissions – had been encouraging enough for him to think about staying for years rather than months. It was Cristofano Gherardi who brought him back to his Tuscan senses. The Venetians might be great colorists, the faithful assistant noted, but their painting suffered from a fatal flaw: they lacked any concept of disegno: “Yet without [disegno] painters cannot attend to their art, and it would be better to return to Rome, which is the true school of all noble arts, and where true quality is recognized far more than in Venice.”
At this remove, the typical Florentine dismissal of all things Venetian can be smiled at fairly easily (if anybody in the 21st century thinks Venetian painting lacks disegno, they're being mighty quiet about it; the Venetians invented the thing), and our authors invite that same reaction on many aspects of Vasari's world. We're told, for instance, that although Vasari and his friends might have known long chunks of Virgil and Ariosto from memory, their mathematical knowledge extended only about as far as long division, and they were still living in a largely Aristotelian world. And although the book makes the now-obligatory digression to deal with the possibility that lost Leonardo artwork might still lurk behind Vasari frescos, the chief attraction here involves none of Vasari's famous subjects but Vasari himself, here delivered with care and detail unseen in English in nearly 40 years.
