Introduction

There is Vasari the painter, Vasari the architect and courtier, Vasari the academician and, last but not least, Vasari the author whose name-and we have to consider carefully what this claim means-appears on the title page of his text, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori, published first in 1550 and then again in 1568 in an enlarged edition.1 And it is this text, clear and pleasing and useful, as the eighteenthcentury Milanese poet Giuseppe Parini described it, that is the main focus of this collection of studies, celebrating as they do the fifth centenary of Vasari’s birth those years ago in Arezzo. It has always been easy to find fault with what he wrote, for its particular definition of the properties of the visual arts of the Renaissance, for his bias as a Tuscan towards all things Tuscan and, in an age without indices and open sources of information, for the simple mistakes of fact we can now recognize as being so frequent in his account of things. And finally-and most dully-he is often reproached for the stories he told of artists, some seemingly misleading, some false, some openly invented, especially when speaking about those who worked long before his own time. And these, so it has been said, work only to distract us from the qualities of the art itself. But this need not be the end of the matter. For if the general hesitations we now harbor about historical objectivity have served us, it is because, at a very direct level, they allow us here to recognize that whatever Vasari said, whether true or false, whether particular or biased, can be a fundamental part of the history he described and something, as against the drier-if more rigorous notes of the archives-that serves to enliven and substantiate the histories we now write, subjective and particular as inevitably they too are.