Lives of the Artists

5 ideas

1. Three ages of art's rebirth

   Vasari arranges art history as a sequence of three ages. The first runs from Cimabue and Giotto, who broke from the rigid Byzantine manner. The second, with Masaccio and Brunelleschi, mastered rule, proportion and perspective, and the third, with Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, added a grace beyond rule that surpasses even the ancients. The scheme judges each artist by how far he advanced the imitation of nature, so the earlier masters rank as necessary steps toward a peak rather than as ends in themselves.

2. Giotto's perfect freehand circle

   A messenger from the pope asked Giotto for a drawing to prove his skill. The pope and his courtiers recognized from that single circle that Giotto surpassed every other painter of his time, and the episode gave rise to the proverb 'rounder than Giotto's O'.

3. Technique described by a practising painter

   Vasari was himself a painter and architect. Read this way, his descriptions are records of craft knowledge, and they stay useful even where his biographical claims are unreliable.

4. Disegno as the father of arts

   Vasari treats disegno, meaning drawing and design, as the one intellectual faculty behind painting, sculpture and architecture. In his account it is the mind's grasp of form, which the hand then carries out. This places the visual arts among the liberal, intellectual disciplines rather than manual trades, and it gave the Florentine Accademia del Disegno its founding rationale.

5. Biography and anecdote build the canon

   Vasari makes the artist's life, character and memorable deeds the means of judging his work, and he leans on vivid and often invented anecdotes. The stories fix reputations more lastingly than the works do, and his preference for Florentine and Tuscan artists, especially Michelangelo, became the default Renaissance canon. That canon is weighted toward artists with good stories and a Tuscan link, and later scholarship has had to argue against it ever since.

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