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A Vasari Companion Introduction Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in 1550, is arguably the first book ever written about art history. Vasari was himself a well-known and successful painter and architect who knew personally many of the artists about whom he wrote, including Michelangelo and Titian. As a knowledgeable insider. he had unusual access to artists’ studios and to private collections. Hence Vasari’s Lives remains a key source of historical information about art of the Italian Renaissance, written by someone who was there. Vasari’s revised and expanded 1568 edition of the Lives covered about 160 artists and filled three volumes—more than even many art historians care to read—so most readers rely on abridged editions that include selections from the full work. It is certainly possible to read the text by itself for information and entertaining anecdotes. However, Vasari mentions hundreds of specific works in the text, most of which have survived to the present. A Vasari Companion seeks to promote a more satisfying reading experience by making available pictures of selected works mentioned in the text. The Companion is intended for use with the following edition : Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Volume I. Translated by George Bull. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. Works shown in the Companion are linked to the text of the Lives using page numbers from this edition. It covers 20 artists, drawn from the full range of years covered by the Lives—by some 1 accounts, the most important 20 artists. (Volume II covers Bull’s selection of the next-most-important 19 artists.) Bull translates Vasari into smoothly readable modern English and provides a nice introductory commentary of his own. This edition is also available as an inexpensive paperback. The Companion does not include a picture of every work referenced by Vasari. Some works mentioned in the Lives are described only vaguely and cannot be matched with confidence to a particular work that is known today. Some works have been destroyed or lost in the 400+ years since the book was written. Others are now generally believed to have been mis-attributed by Vasari and are actually by another artist or by unnamed assistants. Still others have been omitted from the Companion because they are similar to other included works by the same artist, or because I judged them to be insufficiently important or interesting. Images of some of the omitted works can be found in the sources identified below. Using the Companion A Vasari Companion is a single large document in Portable Document Format (PDF). It can be viewed with Adobe Reader (a.k.a. Adobe Acrobat Reader). Most computer owners already have a copy of Adobe Reader and use it to view or print PDF documents. It is free, and many computers come with it pre-installed. If Adobe Reader is not already installed on your computer, it can be downloaded over the Internet from http://www.adobe.com. Basic Use • On most computers, you can start A Vasari Companion by just double-clicking on its file icon. If this does not work, start up Adobe Reader first, and then open A Vasari Companion within Adobe Reader. • Click on the Start button on the title page. • In the Artists Menu, click on the name of an artist. • In the menu of works by that artist, click on the name of a work you wish to view. When finished, you can: – Return to the menu of works by the same artist by clicking on the button containing his name. It is located at a bottom corner of the screen. – Go forward or back a slide at a time in the sequence of slides. Slides are stored internally in the following order: 2 Main title slide Artists Menu Menu of works by artist A* Artist A’s first work Artist A’s second work . Artist A’s last work Menu of works by artist B* Artist B’s first work Artist B’s second work . Artist B’s last work (etc.) *Menu of works may occupy more than one slide Press the key on your keyboard to go forward one slide in this sequence. Press the key to go back one slide. You can use this method of navigation to browse among related slides without having to return to the menu of works each time. Also, the text commentary for some works notes that “the next slide” shows a detail. The easiest way to get there is to press the key. • To return to the Artists Menu, click the Artists Menu button at the bottom corner of the menu of works by a particular artist. • To quit, click the Quit button at the bottom corner of the Artists Menu. More advanced use • The Companion starts up in full-screen view mode. To exit from full-screen mode, press the esc (“escape”) key on your keyboard. On most recent versions of Adobe Reader, you can then navigate the Companion in either of two other view modes by clicking on a tab at the left edge of its window: – Bookmarks view mode shows a scrollable list of the titles of all slides. Click on any slide title to go directly to that slide. (The titles can be made be more readable by choosing the Wrap long bookmarks option at the top of the Bookmarks panel, if present on your version of Adobe Reader.) – Pages view mode shows a scrollable thumbnail gallery of all slides. Click on the thumbnail view for any slide to go to it directly. 3 • In either Bookmarks or Pages view, you can use Adobe Reader’s zooming tools to magnify an image to see more detail. Note, however, that almost all of the digital images are medium-resolution: they remain reasonably sharp after one or two stages of magnification, but beyond that, edges become blurry. • The and keys can also be used to navigate in Bookmarks or Pages view. • To return to full-screen view mode, choose Full Screen from Adobe Reader’s View menu. • For really advanced viewing, you can display any two slides side by side for comparison as follows: – After starting the Companion in Adobe Reader, open a second window to it by choosing New window from the Window menu. – Adjust window positions and sizes in the usual manner to set them up as you wish for comparison. (Try out the Tile... item in the Window menu, if it exists in your version.) Points to Remember Throughout the Italian Renaissance, the Catholic Church was by far the largest client of artists, so naturally there is a predominance of Christian themes in their work. Art was used in part to educate the young about Christian history and dogma, and sometimes to teach a moral lesson. However, it is not necessary to be Catholic or Christian to appreciate the art. Stories about biblical figures provided a very rich source of thematic material and inspiration for artists on almost every aspect of human life. Nobody had ever seen the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or any of the saints, much less angels or the Holy Spirit. Hence artists were expected to give their visual creativity free rein and to imagine how some dramatic human event or supernatural occurrence might have looked, and they competed with each other in doing so. Toward the end of the 15th century and beyond, themes from Greek and Roman mythology and portraiture became more common. At the time Vasari was writing the Lives, there was no precedent for a sweeping account of the history of art and artists of an era. He developed his own formula for such a work and his own standards of reportorial accuracy. His “day job” was as a busy and successful artist and architect; writing the Lives was an avocation. There are known to be many factual errors in the Lives, the most egregious of which are mentioned in footnotes by Bull. Still, Vasari’s organization of periods and styles, his placing of art works that can be viewed today into often vivid historical and biographical contexts, and his criteria for evaluation of individual works have had a lasting influence on art history. 4 Sources Images • Web Gallery of Art (http://www.wga.hu). This superb, award-winning web site in Hungary contains nearly 14,000 digital images of art works from about 1100 to about 1850, specializing in the Renaissance. It is beautifully organized and generally contains the best digital images publicly available on the Web. For many works, a text synopsis of the work’s history, iconography, and/or composition are also available. This web site was the largest single source for images in the Companion. • Giorgio Vasari web site (http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk). This excellent site focuses entirely on art works mentioned in Vasari’s Lives, also keyed to page numbers in the Bull translation. All artists in Volume I and a few from Volume II are covered. I relied on it heavily to map Vasari’s descriptions to particular works, correcting just a few definite or probable mistakes along the way. It tries to cover every work that is identifiable from the Lives, including minor works. However, this site rarely has the best-quality images of works, and the text accompanying each work is usually limited to a few words taken directly from Vasari. • Google image search (http://www.google.com). Google image searches often just led back to the Web Gallery of Art for the best image of a particular work, but occasionally a better-quality image was available from an educational institution or other source.
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