ABSTRACT
Vasari’s association with Don Vincenzo (or Vincenzio) Borghini, the Benedictine monk and scholar who was also one of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s most trusted advisors and civil servants, stretched from at least the end of the 1540s until the artist’s death in 1574. It was important not only for Vasari’s career as an artist and writer but for the history of European art as a whole: it is the most richly documented and probably the most richly productive instance of collaboration between an artist and an intellectual-a “literary” or “humanist” advisor-in the entire early modern period. Inasmuch as such collaboration had been recommended a century before by Leon Battista Alberti, and the ambition to enlarge the discursive scope of the visual arts by integrating literary and philosophical content was central to an emerging conception of art’s social function (a conception implicit in the idea of ut pictura poesis), the collaboration of Vasari and Borghini must be seen as one of the climactic episodes in the developmental trajectory of Renaissance art. Although their partnership consisted primarily of Borghini providing Vasari with thematic material for pictures and large decorative enterprises, it also took the form of joint work on the Lives, as well as a leading role in the formation and early development of the Accademia del Disegno, the first formally incorporated and statesponsored academy of art.
