Vasari Was Born in July 1511 in Arezzo, Tuscany
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Giorgio Vasari was born in July 1511 in Arezzo, Tuscany. At an early age, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skilful painter of stained glass. He was sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini where he joined the artistic circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo, where his humanist education was also encouraged. He was befriended by Michelangelo, whose painting style would influence his own. He died on 27 June 1574 in Florence, aged 62. In 1529, he visited Rome where he studied the works of Raphael and other artists of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards. He was consistently employed by members of the Medici family in Florence and Rome and also worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places. Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555 and the frescoes begun by him inside the vast cupola of the Duomo which were completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci. In Rome, he painted frescoes in the Sala Regia. Giorgio Vasari self - portrait (Public domain) Among his other pupils or followers are included Bartolomeo Carducci, Tommaso del Verrocchio, Federigo del Padovano, Jacopo di Meglio, and Fra Salvatore Foschi of Arezzo. Architecture In addition to his career as a painter, Vasari was also a successful architect. His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza and which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. In Florence, Vasari also built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings. He also renovated the medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. At both, he removed the original rood screen and loft and remodelled the retro-choirs in the Mannerist taste of the time. In Santa Croce, he was responsible for the painting of The Adoration of the Magi which was commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567. In 1562, Vasari built the octagonal dome on the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of high Renaissance architecture. In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammannati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia. The Uffizi Loggia He is often called "the first art historian". Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his “Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori” (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) which he dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and which was first published in 1550. He was the first to use the term "Renaissance" (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti, and he was responsible for our use of the term Gothic Art, though he only used the word Goth which he associated with the "barbaric" German style. The work has a consistent bias in favour of Florentines, and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is systematically ignored in the first edition. Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian), it did so without moderating his biased point of view. There are also many inaccuracies within his “Lives”. For example, Vasari writes that Andrea del Castagno killed Domenico Veneziano, which is not true, given that del Castagno died several years before Veneziano. Vasari also dismisses Giovanni Antonio Bazzi's work as being lazy and offensive, despite the artist having been named a Cavaliere di Cristo by Pope Leo X and having received important commissions for the Villa Farnese and other sites. Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, while others are inventions or generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are more reliable with regard to the painters of his own generation and those of the immediate past. Notwithstanding some of the above criticisms, it is a good read. The Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano is a minor basilica dedicated to Pope Clement I located in Rome, near the Caelian Hill and the Colosseum. The structure is a three-tiered complex of buildings: (1) the present basilica built just before the year 1100 during the height of the Middle Ages; (2) beneath the present basilica is a 4th-century basilica that had been converted out of the home of a Roman nobleman, part of which had in the 1st century briefly served as an early church, and the basement of which had in the 2nd century briefly served as a mithraeum; (3) the home of the Roman nobleman had been built on the foundations of republican era villa and warehouse that had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 64 AD. Gradually, increasing areas have been excavated. The lowest levels of the present basilica contain remnants of the foundation of a possibly republican era building that might have been destroyed in the Great Fire of 64 AD. It could have been an industrial building as a similar building is represented on a 16th-century drawing of a fragment of the Severan marble plan of the city. About a hundred years later (c. 200) a mithraeum, a sanctuary of the cult of Mithras, was built in the courtyard. The main cult room (the speleum, "cave"), which is about 9.6m long and 6m wide, was discovered in 1867 but could not be investigated until 1914 owing to a lack of drainage. The exedra, the shallow apse at the far end of the low vaulted space, was trimmed with pumice to render it more cave-like. Central to the main room of the sanctuary was found an altar, in the shape of a sarcophagus, with the main cult relief of the tauroctony (the image of Mithras slaying a bull) on its front face. There were several monuments, one of which was a statue of St. Peter found in the speleum's vestibule and which is still on display there. 4th-11th century At some time in the 4th century, the lower level of the industrial building was filled in with dirt and rubble and its second floor was re-ordered. An apse was built out over part of the domus, whose lowest floor, with the mithraeum, was also filled in. This "first basilica" is known to have existed in 392, when St. Jerome wrote of the “church dedicated to St. Clement”, who had been a first-century Christian convert, and the 4th Bishop of Rome. Restorations were undertaken in the 9th century and between 1080-99. Apart from those in Santa Maria Antiqua, the largest collection of Early Medieval wall paintings in Rome is to be found in the lower basilica of San Clemente. Four of the largest frescoes in the basilica focus on the life of St. Clement and on the life of St. Alexius. Beno de Rapiza and Maria Macellaria, the benefactors, are shown in two of the compositions with their children, Altilia and Clemens, offering gifts to St. Clement, and on a pillar on the left side of the nave, where they are portrayed on a small scale witnessing a miracle performed by St. Clement. The current basilica was rebuilt by Cardinal Anastasius, from about 1099 to 1120, approximately. Today, it is one of the most richly adorned churches in Rome. The ceremonial entrance (a side entrance is ordinarily used today) is through an atrium surrounded by arcades, which now serves as a cloister, with monastery buildings surrounding it. Irish Dominicans have been the caretakers of San Clemente since 1667. The Dominicans themselves conducted the excavations in the 1950s in collaboration with Italian archaeology students. On one wall in the atrium is a plaque affixed by Pope Clement XI in 1715, praising the Basilica of St. Clement, "This ancient church has withstood the ravages of the centuries." The inscriptions found in S. Clemente, a valuable source illustrating the history of the Basilica, have been collected and published. In one chapel, there is a shrine with the tomb of Saint Cyril of the Saints Cyril and Methodius, who translated the Bible into Slavic language, created the Glagolitic alphabet, and brought Christianity to the Slavs. Occasionally, Pope John Paul II used to pray there for Poland and the Slavic countries. The chapel also holds a Madonna by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato. Alessandro (Francesco Tommaso Antonio) Manzoni was born in Milan, Italy, on 7 March 1785.