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Home , Giorgio Vasari, Giovanni Balducci, San Clemente al Laterano, Silvio Passerini

Giorgio Vasari was born in July 1511 in , . At an early age, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skilful painter of . He was sent to at the age of sixteen by Cardinal where he joined the artistic circle of and his pupils and Jacopo , where his humanist education was also encouraged. He was befriended by , whose would influence his own. He died on 27 June 1574 in Florence, aged 62.

In 1529, he visited where he studied the works of and other artists of the Roman High . Vasari's own Mannerist 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 , 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 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 and with the help of .

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 by the 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 , which connects the Uffizi with the on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the and winds around the exterior of several buildings.

He also renovated the medieval churches of and Santa Croce. At both, he removed the original 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 Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567.

In 1562, Vasari built the octagonal dome on the of Our Lady of Humility in , an important example of .

In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and at Pope Julius III's .

The Uffizi Loggia

He is often called "the first 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 had been in the air since the time of Alberti, and he was responsible for our use of the term , 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 – 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 ), it did so without moderating his biased point of view. There are also many inaccuracies within his “Lives”. For example, Vasari writes that killed , 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 and having received important commissions for the 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 painting a fly on the surface of a painting by 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 is a minor basilica dedicated to located in Rome, near the and the . The structure is a three-tiered complex of buildings: (1) the present basilica built just before the year 1100 during the height of the ; (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 , and the basement of which had in the 2nd century briefly served as a ; (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 , 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 by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato.

Alessandro (Francesco Tommaso Antonio) Manzoni was born in Milan, , on 7 March 1785. Pietro, his father, aged about fifty, belonged to an old family of Lecco, originally feudal lords of Barzio, in the Valsassina, Lombardy. The poet's maternal grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, was a well-known author and philosopher and his mother Giulia also had literary talent. In 1792, his parents’ marriage failed and his mother began a relationship with the writer Carlo Imbonati, moving to England and later to Parisso, Alessandro and so was brought up in several religious institutions.

When he was fifteen, he developed a passion for poetry and wrote two sonnets of considerable merit. Upon the death of his father in 1807, he joined the freethinking household of his mother at Auteuil and spent two years mixing with a literary set, the so- called "ideologues", philosophers of the 18th-century school, where he experienced the anti- creed of Voltaire.

In 1806-1807, while at Auteuil, he produced two works of poetry, one entitled Urania, in the classical style, of which he later became the most powerful opponent, the other an elegy in blank verse, on the death of Count Carlo Imbonati, from whom, through his mother, he inherited considerable property, including the villa of Brusuglio, from that time his main residence.

In 1808, Manzoni married Henriette Blondel, the daughter of a Geneva banker. She came from a Calvinist family but in 1810 she became a Roman Catholic. Her conversion profoundly influenced her husband. In the same yea,r he experienced a religious crisis which led him from Jansenism to an austere form of Catholicism. Manzoni's marriage was a happy one and for several years he led a retiring domestic life, divided between literature and the husbandry of Lombardy.

His intellectual energy in this period of his life was devoted to the composition of the Inni sacri, a series of sacred lyrics, and of a treatise on Catholic morality, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, a task he undertook as reparation for his early lapse from faith. In 1818 he had to sell his paternal inheritance, as his investment had been lost to a dishonest agent. With characteristic generosity in his dealings with his tenants, who were heavily indebted to him, he not only cancelled on the spot the record of all sums owed to him but told them to keep for themselves the whole of the coming maize harvest.

In 1819, Manzoni published his first tragedy, Il Conte di Carmagnola, which, in violating all classical conventions, excited a lively controversy. It was severely criticized in a Quarterly Review article to which Goethe replied in its defence, "one genius," as Count de Gubernatis remarked, "having divined the other." The death of Napoleon in 1821 inspired Manzoni's powerful stanzas Il Cinque maggio (The Fifth of May), one of the most popular lyrics in the . The political events of that year, and the imprisonment of many of his friends, weighed much on Manzoni's mind, and the historical studies in which he sought distraction during his subsequent retirement at Brusuglio provided the germ for his great novel.

I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) is recognised as one of the great works of world literature. It was originally produced in three volumes and released a volume per year from 1825-27, although he continued to revise it for many years after it was first published.

The Penguin Companion to European Literature noted that 'the book's real greatness lies in its delineation of character. . . in the heroine, Lucia, in Padre Cristoforo (the Capuchin friar) and the saintly cardinal of Milan, he has created three living examples of that pure and wholehearted Christianity which was his ideal but his psychological penetration extends also to those who fall short of this standard, whether through weakness or perversity and the novel is rich in pictures of ordinary men and women, seen with a delightful irony and disenchantment which always stops short of cynicism, and which provides a perfect balance for the evangelical fervour of his ideal'.

In 1822, Manzoni published his second tragedy, Adelchi, about the overthrow by Charlemagne of the Lombard domination in Italy, and containing many veiled allusions to the existing Austrian rule. With these works, Manzoni's literary career effectively ended. But he continued to revise The Betrothed in Tuscan-Italian, and in 1840 republished it in that form, with an historical essay, Storia della colonna infame, on details of the 17th- century plague in Milan, an important element of the novel. He also wrote a small treatise on the Italian language.

The death of Manzoni's wife, Henriette, in 1833 was preceded and followed by those of several of his children, and of his mother. In 1837 he was married to Teresa Borri, widow of Count Stampa. Teresa was also to die before him, and of nine children born to him in his two marriages all but two predeceased him. In 1860, King Victor Emmanuel II named him a senator. The death of his eldest son, Pier Luigi, on 28 April 1873, was the final blow which hastened his own end. He had already been weakened when he had a fall on 6 January while leaving the Milanese church of San Fedele, hitting his head on the steps, and he died after 5 months of cerebral meningitis, a complication of the trauma. His funeral was celebrated in the church of San Marco with almost royal pomp. His remains, after they lay in state for some days, were followed to the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan by a vast cortege, including the royal princes and all the great officers of state but his noblest monument was Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem, written to honour his memory.

Manzoni conceived the idea for his novel in 1821 when he read a 1627 Italian edict that specified penalties for any priest who refused, without good reason, to perform a marriage when requested to do so. More material for his story came from Giuseppe Ripamonti's Milanese Chronicles.

The first version, Fermo e Lucia, was written between April 1821 and September 1823. He then heavily revised it, finishing in August 1825; it was published on 15 June 1827, after two years of corrections and proof-checking. Manzoni's chosen title, Gli sposi promessi, was changed for the sake of euphony shortly before its final commitment to printing. The original title is the more correct Italian as it meets the normal criteria of an adjective following a noun if the adjective has three or more syllables, but I Promessi Sposi reads better.

In the early 19th century, there was still controversy as to what form the standard literary language of Italy should take. Manzoni was firmly in favour of the dialect of Florence and, as he himself put it, after "washing his clothes [vocabulary] on the banks of the Arno [the river passing through Florence]", he revised the novel's language for its republication in 1842, cleansing it of many of its Lombardy colloquialisms.

I Promessi Sposi - a very brief summary

A young couple, Renzo and Lucia, is planning to marry but a local minor noble, Don Rodrigo, has seen Lucia and intervenes to stop the wedding because he intends to seduce Lucia.

The young people seek the advice of Fra Cristoforo who goes to see Don Rodrigo to persuade him to allow the wedding. The friar is thrown out by Don Rodrigo’s thugs and he advises the couple to leave their village to find places of shelter and he arranges for Lucia to enter a convent - not as a potential religious but for her safety - where she encounters an unhappy young woman, the Nun of Monza, who has been placed in the convent because her father does not wish, for economic reasons, to provide her with a dowry.

Renzo has a number of adventures, is arrested (and escapes), and eventually returns to his village to find it ruined (and all the crops spoiled) by invading soldiers, who have also brought in their wake - the plague.

There are two other very significant characters: L’Innominato and Cardinal Federico Borremeo (a genuine historical person). L’Innominato (the unnamed one) is a powerful robber baron, above Don Rodrigo in the pecking order, who represents disorder and evil. The cardinal represents kindness and order. Lucia stands for purity and Renzo, recklessness, bravery and the wildness of youth. The priest, Don Abbondio, who in fear of Don Rodrigo refuses to marry the couple, represents cowardice and a failure to honour his clerical vows. Fra Cristoforo is an example of humility and simple goodness.

However, L’Innominato has already begun to feel guilt for his evil past behaviour even before he receives a visit from the cardinal and following a conversation with the prelate he resolves to change his ways and he intervenes when, with the connivance of the Nun of Monza and her lover, Egidio, Lucia is abducted by Don Rodrigo’s henchmen, L’Innominato, after suffering a of torment, brought on by a bad conscience, orders Lucia’s release. Don Abbondio is severely reprimanded by the cardinal.

Don Rodrigo becomes a victim of the plague and is sent to the lazaretto (quarantine station) where he is tended by Fra Cristoforo and Lucia, who also had become a victim of the plague but has recovered, and who forgives him for his evil intentions towards her. Don Rodrigo and Fra Cristoforo die, the latter through his selfless efforts on behalf of the plague victims.

Eventually the couple marry and find work running a flour mill.

This is a summary of about 600 pages of The Betrothed.

It is a wonderful story.

Have another safe week. Best wishes, Gerald and Marie