ABSTRACT
The vita of Giotto by Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) is not a biography in the conventional sense. As is now generally recognized, his presentation of the artist in his Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1568) is a mixture of fact and fiction, and he derived much of what he says about Giotto from literary sources. Vasari created an image or figure of Giotto out of the various stories about the artist he found in The Decameron (ca. 1350) of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and in the Three Hundred Tales (ca. 1390) of Franco Sacchetti (1332-1400), as well as in the writings of other authors, such as the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) and the architect Antonio Averlino, called Il Filarete (ca. 1400-ca. 1469).1 Structurally, the stories Vasari used to represent Giotto are variations on paradigmatic tales of artists, especially the fourth-century BCE Greek painter Apelles, by ancient authors. The Natural History of Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), which contains several chapters on art and artists, is particularly relevant. Pliny based his account of the life and works of Apelles-elements of which are echoed in Vasari’s vita of Giotto-in a now-lost book about Greek artists by Duris of Samos (ca. 350-281 BCE). Thus Vasari’s stories about Giotto are ultimately rooted “in the realms of myth and saga,” and they transfer “a wealth of imaginative material” from early antiquity into Renaissance literature.2 As Vasari surely intended, his representation of Giotto, though constructed from earlier sources, is not merely literary. His Giotto is a mythical figure; he is a culture-hero of the first order; he is Apelles reincarnated.
