ABSTRACT
Since its first publication in 1550, those seeking to learn about Italian Renaissance artists have read Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Some, like William Aglionby, writing in London in 1685, were sure that reading the Lives could make art “familiar and easie to the Nobility and Gentry of this Nation,” and even prompt British painters to an excellence in history painting that had not yet been achieved.3 Others like Annibale Carracci, writing not quite a century earlier, were horrified by the judgments pronounced and canonized in Vasari’s seminal text. Moving beyond reading, both Aglionby and Carracci rewrote Vasari. Aglionby did so by combining his own “choice observations upon the art of painting” with selections from the Vasarian lives to make a new book, whose title page (Fig. 15.1) featured Cimabue, Raphael, and Michelangelo but named neither Aglionby nor Vasari explicitly. Annibale Carracci rewrote by literally putting his words alongside Vasari’s in the liminal space of the book’s margin, annotating his copy of the 1568 Lives with comments, opinions, and disagreements with the central text. This chapter explores the reception of the Lives in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by examining a few cases in which Vasari’s readers-now known or unknown-were moved to become writers themselves, either by penning their thoughts in the margins of their books, or by creating completely new books, openly or covertly.
