In Our Time - Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists

Episode Date: May 27, 2010

Melvyn Bragg discusses 'Lives of the Artists' - the great biographer Giorgio Vasari's study of Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects. In 1550 a little known Italian artist, Giorgio Vasari, published a revolutionary book entitled 'Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times'. In it he chronicled the evolution of Italian art from the early pioneer Giotto to the perfection of Michelangelo.For the first time, Vasari set out to record artists' eccentricities and foibles as well as their artistic triumphs. We learn that the painter Piero di Cosimo was scared of the sound of bells, and witness Donatello shouting at his statues. But amongst these beguiling stories of human achievement, Vasari also explained his own theory of what made great art.In more recent decades, Vasari has been criticised for not allowing factual accuracy to get in the way of a good story. Nonetheless, the influence of his work has been unparalleled. It has formed and defined the way we think about Renaissance art to this day and some credit him with being the founder of the discipline of the history of art. Few artists that Vasari criticised have been comprehensively rehabilitated and Vasari's semi-divine trio of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo are still seen as the apotheosis of artistic perfection. With:Evelyn WelchProfessor of Renaissance Studies and Academic Dean for Arts at Queen Mary, University of LondonDavid EkserdjianProfessor of History of Art and Film at the University of LeicesterMartin KempEmeritus Professor in the History of Art at the University of OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1550, a little-known Florentine, Corteur and Painter, published a book that would transform the way people saw Renaissance art. Georges Vasari's, the lives of the artists, presented for the first time the biographies and works of Italian painters and sculptors

as the story of an ascent from the breakthroughs of Jotto in the 3rd. 13th century, towards the perfection of Michelangelo. In his masterwork, Vasari pens vivid sketches which include the eccentricities, which drove Italy's artistic innovators. We encounter Pierre de Cosimo, a painter who was scared at the sound

of bells, and witnessed Nolitello shouting at his statues. And Vasari sees all these artists as steps towards the triumphs of the semi-divine trio Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo. In the process, some say that Vasari unwittingly founded a whole new discipline of study, the

of art. And despite doubts about the veracity of some of his stories, without this monumental work, art history would be immeasurably poorer. With me to discuss Vasari's lives of the artists are Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford, David Exergeon, Professor of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester, and Evelyn Welsh, Professor of Renaissance Studies and Academic Dean for Arts at Queen Mary University of London. Evelyn, before we talk about Vasari himself, can you give us some idea of the context of the time, Florence. Yes. Vizare's life, which spans the period from 1511 to 1574, is a time of really quite radical change, both in Florence and in Tuscany. Vizari is born in Arezzo, which is a town which

owes allegiance, rather reluctant allegiance to Florence. And to understand the kind of transformative nature of the period that he lives through, we need to realise that for the previous 200 years, really before he's born. Florence has been a republic with communal values. Now, up in the 15th century, these communal values are slightly subverted by the Medici family, a family of bankers. And in 1494,

this family is exiled, thrown out by the Florentines who want to restore a true republic. So when Vizari is growing up, Florence is the first third of the 16th century. Exactly, the first third of

the 16th century. So when Vizari is growing up from 1511 until he comes to Florence in around 1524, Florence is really struggling to work out whether or not it can retain its republican values. Around 1513, the Medici become popes and they then restore Medici dominance within Florence. So there is this early struggle in the first quarter of the 16th century. Is Florence going to retain its republicanism? Is it going to be a place of communal values? Or is it become one of the sort of standard governments of Europe at the time, a principality?

Which it did, and how did that affect Basari? Well, Vizari, it takes quite a long time. There's quite a struggle. Vizari is brought to Florence to be trained with these young Medici potential heirs to rule Florence there. He comes with Alessandro and Apolito de Medici

and he claims to have grown up with them to have been educated with them. Vasari is through and through a man who believes in the Medici who believes that the Medici deserve to rule Florence. What happens, however, is in 1527,

with the sack of Rome, the Medici popes lose power in Rome and therefore lose power in Florence. And there's a really terrible period where there's a siege of Florence in 1529 as we get a kind of Republican revolution going on, which is over thrown. We've got to get to the artists.

The history of Florence is interesting in the dates of time, but they're confusing the issue. Asari gets to Florence. He's trained with the Medici's. He's got an apprenticeship with a very good artist himself, and he gets on with what's going to become his career. David Excergian, can we tell a little more about Vasari's background? Yes, well, in Arezzo, he comes from a modest background. His name means that he's from a line, as it were, of vase makers.

What, sorry? A vase makers, as it were, a vassarro. It's a potter. So he's not grand at all. He's proud of his great-grandfather, who was some kind of a painter, and he sort of swanked about that a bit. in the lives and indeed gives him a biography. But he himself is trained to know Latin.

He was taught by the local humanist and scholar, who's called Polastra, and he clearly was quite a prodigy as a bright young boy. And when a cardinal called Pasarini comes to his hometown, when he's just probably about 12 or that kind of age. He recites enormous chunks of Virgil Zanid to him, and that is what impresses Pasarini, presumably, and he's the one who sends him off to Florence. And in France he is apprenticed?

Yes, because although, as Evelyn's already said, he's learning alongside these young Medici princelings, he is directed towards art and he's apprenticed to Andrea del Sarto and Andrea de Sato is a very distinguished painter and a very important artist of that period. Just to refresh listeners' knowledge on this

when apprentice is about how old is it about 13, 40 and 19th? Yeah, you're in your teens. Well, at the very beginning I think you do pretty unthrilling things. Well, let's list them. Yes, well, you clean up the studio, you grind, colours, you prepare the plaster for walls to be frescoed, you do things of that kind. But gradually as time goes by, you learn probably initially to draw, maybe not even on sheets of paper, but on things that can be rubbed out like a blackboard slate almost, and you get on with that. And

that grounding in looking at the human figure, for instance, and drawing from the human figure would have started relatively early. And I think probably that artists were the ones, if you like, who survived. Because there must be people who started as apprentices and were completely rotten at the art part, and therefore they didn't go on to become artists. How good as a painter was, Vasari? He's kind of not Premier League, but perfectly good second string.

He's a very decent painter, but not a great artist. He can be really... rather good and sometimes the merits of the biography of the great book have made people think that what he had to do in the art line was inferior. But he was an architect, he was also

an architect. Yes, he was also an architect and some people would say that his greatest works are in architecture and we all or virtually all know about one of his works even though we may not know he was responsible for it and that's the Uffizi

now the great art gallery in Florence. That's for a man who comes from a humble background to Florence. We have the Prince Ling Association that Evelyn taught us about, which obviously gave him, if it's as true as he says it, it gave him a good step up. But even so, it's a big step to go and then design what became the Uffizi Gala, isn't it? No, absolutely. And in a professional sense, his career was very successful, and he's working for popes and Medici and Falmese and all the great people of his time,

or many of the great people of his time. So he's painting, and he's painting big frescoes, and he's designing a feat and other things. He designed the bridge, the passageway over the bridge, didn't he? Yes, yes. That's so-called Vasari Corridor. Yes, he's very, very busy. And in fact, probably one of the things you could say about him as an artist is he's a bit too busy. And one of his most famous works is a huge fresco decoration in Rome, which is known as the room of 100 days, because he spent 100 days producing it.

And various people have thought that maybe I spent a bit longer and it might have been a bit better. Martin Kemp, the first edition of Versailles, the translation is, Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, sculptors and Architects from Chimambouet to Our Times, published in 1550. Why did he write it?

He tells the story of how the idea as such came up. And as you said in your introduction, Vasari's stories are not always to be trusted, but this one I think is okay. and it can be backed up. He's in Rome in 1546. He's his immediate patroness Alessandro Farnese of the papal family, and he's at a dinner, a kind of humanist dinner, and Fassari could hold his own pretty well with these clever people. And one of the people there is Paolo Joviou, not much known today, but an important man, a pioneer biographer. And Paolo Joviou was collecting portraits of as many famous people as possible,

and he'd already in his own... We're talking about painted portraits here. Painted portraits, yes, yes. Some copies, some originals and so on. Not written portraits. I was trying to make a distinction here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not written portraits, but actual portraits,

which is a remarkable enterprise. And they made each you get wind of this and send off an artist actually to make copies of all Palo Joveo's portraits. But to come back to the story, at this dinner, Palo Joveo, who'd already written briefly about Michelangelo

Leonardo Rafael says, yeah, a really good idea to do all the artists, you know, to gather all this together. Why don't you do it, Giorgio? Georgio has various protestations of inadequacy and so on, as you do in these circumstances. But that was the germ of it. Vasari had already been collecting lots of material, so it wasn't falling on. Why are you doing that? We don't know. I think it's instinctive.

I think we shouldn't underrate the extent to which he really thought that his art needed great promotion. So he travelled around a lot. He had quite a erratic career early on. So he had the advantage of going to lots of different places and began to assemble material. So the germ of it was laid down. So Palo Jovio's seed was falling on fertile ground.

And how did he set about it? He's got this stuff, but it's a book that is more than having a sort of magpie collection, isn't it? He had notes, he'd assembled lots of things. He always had a fantastic visual memory as well. But he then needed lots of people to feed in. Apart from the people he met at that dinner party,

did he have any other... Were there any classical sources he could model himself on? Well, the most immediate one, and one he himself refers to in his first ideas for the book, is Pliny. In Pliny's natural history, you've got this... What were those dates? What a Pliny's dates, chaps.

I'm really sorry. I'm sorry to ask you that question. But it's a long time ago. A ancient Roman. We're a relationship. What do you expect? Eruption of Vesuvius, wasn't it? Eruption of Vesuvius, that time.

He died. His uncle died. Anyway, Pliny's great natural. See, I hear rumors you might be doing Pliny in the future, so we'll know about that. And Pliny outlined. this history of Greek artists, most of whom he'd seen nothing of, as a succession of achievements as a cumulative thing. So he gets the idea, there are both individual artists,

but there is a progression that art goes from not so good through good to brilliant. And that's what it, and is that a distinguishing factor? Because Pliny doesn't do that in, as far as I know from an outside riffing me, it doesn't do that, he sets it out, but it doesn't do that at anything like the detail with the structure that Vasari brings to it. What is the extraordinary Vasari, and if you look at all biographical enterprises,

emperors, saints, and so on, is he creates these enormous biographies with lots of little moral tales in them about each artist, characterising the artist and his works, and then manages to keep a grip upon a great pattern of progress, which he maps out in three periods. I'm trying to look at plenty. Yeah, I've got it in your notes, Madhima.

this was 23 to 79 in the Christian era. Oh, I remember it well. I'm such a way. We can get back on trying. My friends will lynch me. No, we're concentrating it. So he brings this out. Is it in any way a career move?

Are we talking about... Can you bring the Medici's to bear on this for a moment or two? That he's trying to please... He's in a place that's now ruled by this tremendous family. They want to... their ancestors by being patrons of art, and the princely states of Italy are vying with each other in that. That's what they want to have, great artists.

And he wants to be part of that, and this is a good way in. I'm not running it down at all. I'm just trying to find out what's happening to him. Yeah, the initial catalyst is ruined, but he's then quickly back into Grand Duke or Florence, and it's part of establishing both art as a great pursuit, which, of course, is not absolutely accepted, but also Tuscany and particularly Florence.

And Cosimo de Medici, who becomes the Grand Duke of Florence, it's all part of this great enterprise of building up Florence as really the cradle of modern civilization. And Vasari is very much part of that in his buildings. In these enormous amounts of paintings he does in what we now call the Palazzovico, the old government palace, the Medici move from their palace into this extraordinarily large an inconvenient place, but this is to say

we are now the government essentially. And in 1563, 1553, only 3 years after, 63, sorry, only shortly after the publication of the lives, the Florentine Academy is founded

under Cosimo's Aegis. So the arts are part of the status of Florence as this leading cultural force in the world. Embellin, there's an underlying structure to Vasari's work. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, well... It's 2,000 pages long in the additions that are strewn around this table. But it had a very clear structure. Yes, it had a very clear structure. Those 2,000 pages we need to realise even longer when it was first published in 1550

because they had a preliminary introductory bit which is almost always removed about the technicalities of making works of art, the kinds of things that David was describing earlier. And this is then followed by a tripartite structure which is quite biblical in its organization in that you start with the dim light

of starting to realize how to get a divinity through a figure like Jotto in the first section. Coming out of the Gothic, is it? He doesn't really call it that. These are people struggling towards something they can dimly understand. They can dimly see how they could be better, how they could recover classical antiquity. Then he has a second section, which is really the 15th century,

in which artists such as Donatello are beginning to wake up. And Vizarre talks about Donatello as being a kind of proto-Michelago. And then you get to this kind of great moment, which is the moment of Vizari's own time, and you get to the divine Michelangelo, who's been sent by God to rest, the world from its lack of knowledge of proper design. He says that in those terms, doesn't he?

He very much describes... He writes that in those terms. There's no question. Michaelangelo has been sent by God and is the supreme artist of all time. Absolutely. What you do after that, of course, is very difficult. That's later in the problem. Can you give us some idea, David,

that the apotheosis was Michelangelo, but what is... Evelyn's mentioned Jotto and mentioned Masacho. Can you give us some idea of what he's... saying about them as they reach for the light? Well, one of the interesting things is that for Vasari, as has already been said, the art of his own time is basically the best kind of art. And that presents you with a challenge when you're looking at a very different kind of art.

But actually, one of the other impressive things about the way he goes about it is that he recognises people within their period as superior and inferior. Jotto is a figure who from his own lifetime was a superstar and that's clearly evidenced also in the fact that he's mentioned in the Divine Comedy as somebody who overcomes his master, Jima Buoy. So you have an artist whose style seems very unconvincing from Vassari's perspective and he talks about people of that period who make their figures stand on tiptoe,

because they don't know how to plant their feet on the ground. But he's a great artist. How does it define Jotto? What Paul Ticks does it give him that make him a great artist? Well, one of the ways in which he's a great artist is by doing great things. Such as? Well, there's a famous story about the O of Jotto, where somebody comes to ask Jotto to, as it were, present his credentials.

and Jotto simply draws a circle freehand that says go on, take that, that'll do. But he also paints, you know, a fly on the nose of his master's Madonna, which Chima Boitans to brush off when he's a lad. And that is clearly, again, to do with realism. Martin Gim. One of the things that Vassari says about Jotto is that painters, after his age, owe the same debt to Jotto as they do to nature. So Jotto is the person who really, after Chimabwey, who learned, did lots of good design and things like this, he goes to the source of nature, which Vassari continually stresses.

It doesn't mean to say you're doing kind of raw naturalism because Vizari's view of nature as you look at it in a perfected mode. But he sees Jotto as the first person who does that and the anecdote about Chimaboi discovering the young Jotto while he's tending sheep, drawing. from nature is all part of that of saying we have to go to nature to extract true design from nature according to our intellectual understanding. To jump from Schuette, to Michael Angelo, David, to come back to you from him. Why did he think that all great art led to Michelangelo and how did he describe? And we're using the word divine because he used it, his divine greatness. What was his argument?

Well, the timing of Michelangelo's position within the scheme of things is very helpful. But I think that one of the other points is that Michelangelo satisfactorily combines all the arts because this is a book not just about painting, although painting predominates. So Michelangelo is a great painter, he's a great sculptor, he's a great architect, he can do the lot. He's a good poet too. And he's a good poet too. and, in fact, he's a wonderful draftsman and design this word

Dizenio in Italian, which means both drawing, the act of drawing, but also designing, inventing, thinking up visual forms is central there. Can you develop the Dysenio idea? Why Bessaria admired it so much

and why he thought that Michaelangelo had really got that more than anyone? Yeah, it's not Vassari's invention it goes right the way back. And Chinino-Cennini, who's writing about 1,400, emphasizes draw, draw, draw, draw, design. Now, it's more than we mean by drawing or design. It's the fundamental way by which we understand and note down

the order of nature. He's insistent that nature has an order. It's put there by God. What does he mean by order in that, son? he means a nature which is purged of what you would call accidents, kind of Aristotle's accidents. I'm afraid you'll have to keep going. What do you mean my accident?

Accidents, well, if we look at ourselves around this table, none of us, I think, would claim to have exactly an ideal nose. And this would be attributed to the proclivities of ourselves and the oddness of our development, etc., etc. So he is essentially aiming in Dizenio to get a nature which is inherently revealing the beauty in itself rather than too many of the individual peculiarities. And Dizeno potentially in that case, as Leonardo stressed, can deal with almost any visual pursuit, whether it's astronomy or geography or anatomy or whatever.

Wasn't there a case where Michael Angelo fooled a paper? with David, where he pretended to redo the nose because the the patron didn't approve of the nose, but he didn't. It just faked it. Ored a bit of dust down and the man said, oh, it's much better now. Exactly. There was an anecdote about

Donatello, exactly this. One of his figures on Orsand McKayley that the commissioners disliked it when they saw it at ground level. He put it up in the niche, pretended to work on it. And the patron said, oh, that's

much better. I think it's important to note that Michael Angel actually didn't like Vassarre's first life of him in the 1550 edition and seems to have commissioned his own separate biography, autobiography. What didn't you like that? Well, he didn't like the notion that he'd actually been taught to do anything. He wanted to be much more jotto-like to have been kind of given this divine sense that you didn't need to be trained by Girland I or anyone like that. You didn't need to learn to do this. You were just naturally born, a genius. But Vasari, to give him full credit,

when he wrote the second and much plumber edition in 68, tracked down the papers which had seen Michelangelo apprenticed and put them in his book. Exactly. And that's because of this debate that's going on. Can you actually just be

born into art, or do you actually still have to go through this training process? And Vasari's really keen to ensure that that kind of sense of veracity. It's not simply anecdotes, it's also real documents that he includes letters, records of training,

as David was talking about. But again and again when you read this, look back in it, the training is intensive and starts very early, as David said very early on, and they start, you want to say something, David. Well, I mean, on that point, people in

this period are incredibly gifted at incredibly young ages. And, for example, Parmagenino, an artist born in 153, who goes to Rome in 1524, because he's sort of almost like a footballer being transferred to the, you know, to Manchester United. I wonder when football was going to come. I just knew it. I should have put a bet on. Right?

He is already a very established artist. He's 20. He's produced major works in his teams. Mantania the same. But it's because they started work. training when they're about 12 or 13 and they worked hard and they were told out to do things and they got on with it and they imitated or died really. Absolutely.

Let's talk about the, we've talked about Dizeno, or Martin has. There was also, Vasari also valued Grazie. Can you tell us about that? So Grazie is a term that's traditionally used for poetry and it means grace

and is usually allied to terms like sweetness, charm and it's often considered a more feminine attribute. However, in this particular period, Vizari very much uses it to describe movement, to describe particularly courtly movement and courtly behavior. And it's a very, very important part of the style of Raphael, for example, who is full of grace not only in his pictures, but also in his life. And one of the very interesting things that Martin's alluded to that Vizari does in each of his biographies is try to, as it were, get the artist's personality

and the way they paint and the way their images and objects look to interact with each other. Yes, he makes this conjunction, doesn't it? Very clearly. Martin, you might take it up, or Evelyn, continue it. You look at the artist,

you get the character of the artist and this pious manned as pious paintings, this coleric man does colerick painting. It doesn't work all the time by a long way, but it sets a sort of pattern, doesn't it, Martin? It sets a pattern which is immensely seductive and we've still not ceased to be seduced by it, the idea that it doesn't have it.

taking account that some of the people painting the religious paintings are atheists. Absolutely, and you've got the paradox that somebody like Chalini, who Vasari doesn't write about but knows very well, which is a contemporary, does these immensely suave and polished works and is a very violent man.

So these obvious tie-ins don't quite work, but we still expect them to do so. We still write lives of creative figures. And one of Vasari's correspondence, a man called Vincenzo Borgini, who's immensely important to him, said, Georgia, it doesn't really matter about their lives, because they're not like kings, their lives don't matter, it's only the works that matter.

But he has seduced us into lives in a very profound way. David, you want to say something. Yeah, I was going to take the example of Perugino, who's Raphael's teacher and mentor at the end of the 15th century, who paints these incredibly sweet-y, charming, slightly sentimental, religious pictures, And then suddenly in one of his works presents us with the self-portrait and you see this sort of sinister, thuggish, nasty-looking guy and realise that there was a huge gulf between what was going on on the panel or the fresco

and what was going on in his head. But on the other hand, thuggish guys can do sweet things, guys. You can look thuggish, you can look thuggish. But I don't think he was a sweet guy. If I can come in here, this is a very, this is a topos, which we very much associate with, again, poetics. And so, I mean, Vizaria is trying to do an extraordinary thing here. We mustn't lose sight of it.

There are no illustrations in these three-volume lives of the artist. He's having to use words to conjure up images of the paintings he's describing or the sculptures he's describing in the reader's mind. So he's drawing on this terminology of terribleness, terribilita, when he talks about a more masculine artist, Grazie, when he's talking about a more courtly artist, because those words mean something to the readers. There was a cliche that banged around

that every painter paints himself, only dip into a dipinge say. Michelangelo at one point is asked, why one painter paints rather good asses. You can imagine what Michelangelo's answer would be to that particular question. But it's something which is there in the period, and it's a problem in a way,

because you're aiming both at absolute art, as it were, an art of absolute beauty, but you also recognize individual styles. And one of Vasari's dilemmas, and dilemmas for almost all theorists who believe in absolute rules of art is how do you balance the individual style, the individual manner, against the absolute art. And this is something which is never quite resolved. But it's a dynamic which makes the book the powerful thing that it is, really, isn't it? It's a dynamic that runs through the book. and in a way Michelangelo has achieved the supreme standards,

but you can recognise, Vasari recognised, and everybody recognised that Macalachaelangelo's art didn't look like anybody else's. Evelyn, so the book comes out, 1550, 1551, it's there, it's revised and extended and developed 18 years later. But let's take with that. How, and briefly, how does it receive? What sort of Florence did we have then?

The Medici's are there, there's Michelangelo still there, It's as exciting as it sounds. Sadly, probably not. Oh, I knew you. By the time it's published, Vizare is actually in Rome, and he describes in his own autobiography how when Cosmo de Medici, who I don't want to get into the dates,

because I know you're not like that. So I just was too many at the start, like too many notes. So when Grandi of Cosmodo de Medici gets into power, He's actually not a member of the mainstream Medici family. He simply happens to share the name of the original Cosmodo Medici. So when Cosmada Medici, as it were, the Grand Duke comes into power in 1537, Vizari essentially says, I could have gone to court, I could have got a job at court,

but I'm tired of courts. I'm going to live for art now. And really what he then does is he tries to make his play in Rome. 1550, he dedicates this book to Cosma in the hopes of getting a job. He doesn't get a job. For about four years, he really has to work quite hard to insert himself into this new, much more elaborate court structure. Okay. How was the book received, Martin?

What did people think of it? Did he change the way people thought about art and artists at the time? First of all, Vasari testifies that it was very popular as he would and it sold out, but I think we have every reason to think that was true and for a second expanded edition to come along is an indication that it had been regarded as a success that people devoured it. It really sets the standard for virtually every kind of writing

about visual arts and some other arts through to our own day. Immediately it meant that when the baroque artist came along you had somebody like Bellori who said, we've got to update all this, because we've got Caravaggio, we've got Caracci and all these people. So that rolled on.

When some northern artists were given attention, Carol Van Mander and the early 17th century uses the Vasari model to tell the story of the northern artists. People write about the Borenees artists and so on. So there's an immediate effect. But I think in the bigger... Because Masari's mainly writing about the Tuscan artist. The Vassari is writing from a Tuscan perspective.

and he says the Venetians paint well, but they really can't draw, to put it crudely. So you've got lots of responses. And I can think of no book in any cultural area which had a comparable impact as Vasari. Evelyn, can you briefly tell us that the current scholarly view of whether Vasari did it

or whether Vasari did all of it or whether it did any of it? Now, I know this sort of thing can go on forever in many tombs, and it deserves to have them, but we don't have forever. What's the view? Did Vasari himself write it? I'm not saying it matters or it doesn't matter, but what's the view? Well, the current view is that there are bits that Vizari wrote himself. He had a lot of help and assistance. He had a range of people sending him material from all over Italy, which he incorporated into the book. our notion of authorship, which is either you have a single author or you have a kind of committee, isn't one that he would have recognised.

Nor would Michelangelo, really. Nor with Michelangelo. He had a lot of helpers. Absolutely. And, of course, some of his helpers, in fact, are humanists, their intellectuals. So there's been a tendency to say, it must have been the humanists who wrote the best bits, and Vizari was responsible for the lousy bits. Well, that's a come-upness, isn't it? Do you believe that? I don't, actually. I think that if you look at Vizari's own,

we have about a thousand letters which survive from Vizari. He was extremely well trained, not only in terms of the kind of practicalities of painting, but also the practicalities of being a courtier. And being a courtier means being a poet, being somebody who understands the sort of essentials of good writing. Also he brought out the best of people, the letters from Michelangelo to him.

I show that the respect. Michael Josted him a little bit. Well, you'd think that Vizari might have carefully selected, which letters he included. Why not? I mean, if you can't catholic for your own book, you're in a very poor way. David, what about his league table, which seems to have obtained for several hundred years, besides league tables who was great, indeed divine, who was less great, that has lasted. Why do you think it's lasted? Well, I think because he had a very good judgment on such matters, honestly. If you take the central trinity of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, they are the fundamental figures who, established the greatness of the third age of his time, and we're all perfectly happy to agree that they were very great artists.

One of the things that some people say about him, and it's been alluded to, is that he's totally or very Florence-centric. But when he looks at people in other regions of Italy, he often gives them considerable regard and respect, Correggio, who's an artist completely different in start. from what Vasari himself does, he rates very highly. Titian is a major figure,

but he can't draw, perhaps, but he's still a great artist, clearly. Yes, you can see this in where he positions Georgioni, who he sees as the founder of the new manor in the Venetian school, and he occupies the position that Leonardo does. Leonardo is older considerably

than Raphael and the deal older than Michelangelo. Georgeoni is younger than Tijuana, so he positions Georgione there, recognizing that he's doing a different kind of thing, but he has a similar grace, a similar suavity, a similar softness, which gets away from the dry, hard manner of the earlier period. I think we have to acknowledge

how few people have actually read Vizori from start to finish. So particularly the additions that we have available to us tend to pull out the artists who contemporaries today either in 2010 or in the 1950s when the paperback editions started, paperback editions started to appear, chose which bits of Vizari to highlight. And so huge swathes of artists whom he actually had quite a lot of respect for, simply disappeared from our understanding. And that included quite a number of female artists

whose lives are very rarely included in compilations. One of the interesting things about this is that there's a tendency also, So not just to read to extract, but also to read the stuff which will tell you about the people whom you're interested in. So if you're writing a book on Donatello, you pour over the life of Donatello. But if you read the whole book, you come across weird and wonderful things and just literally the other day for some completely different purpose. I came across a little reference in the life of a pretty minor Florentine

contemporary of André del Sato called Franchibijo, where at the end of the biography, Vasari says that he had a brother and that the brother did an in sign on which he represented a gypsy woman telling a fortune, reading a palm. Well, that's an amazing reference because, okay, it's an in sign rather than a formal painting. But this is somebody doing a Caravaggio subject decades and decades before Caravaggio. I'm not sure the people. who write about Caravaggio have noticed this. Maybe they have but decided to skip over it.

Do you think this league table gets in the way? Yes. Why? I do. Because as we've been describing, sometimes it actually makes things too simple

and too straightforward. It's very useful if you only have 10 minutes and you're in the Uffizi and you want to know what to look at quickly. That's very helpful. But actually,

Vilari is more complicated than that and the history of art written as a set of biographies also gets in the way of our understanding of let's say of the social structures or of the training that goes into making a work of art or of the economics of making art. It's a rather narrow way

of thinking about the making of works of art. And it's very difficult to look at Byzantine art or indeed medieval cathedrals and think of it in terms of biographers. Or indeed 17th century Dutch art. Martin. Yes, the whole notion that the story of art is the story of individuals.

Gombrick in his famous book, The Story of Art says, you know, this is the story, there isn't a story of art, there's a story only of artists, and that is profoundly Vasarian statement. What do you think the legacy is then, David, Versaer's legacy, today?

Well, I think what Martin said is in a sense right. We tend broadly to write an awful lot even now of biographies of artists or studies of individual artists, and it's much, rarer for people to take categories or themes

and do it that way. That's one of the major legacies. It is a both an easy and can be an effective way through because artists magnetised that time. So in talking about the artists you can talk about the time as you're doing it, haven't it? Well you also find it's a set of biographies

of patrons as well. What we haven't really talked about is that each of Vizari's lives is not only a moral about how to be an excellent artist, but it's also about how to be an excellent artist, but it's also about how art should be valued and how artists should be valued. We need to remember that in Vizari's own period,

painters were actually quite low down on the social scale. They didn't earn vast sums of money. They didn't have high reputations. So it's a kind of message to his readers that someone like Jotto is paid well, Donatello is honored by Cosmodo de Medici, just as the second Cosmode Medici ought to honor his artist's Vizori. So there's a kind of theme running throughout about how art itself is a very valuable socially worthwhile activity.

And we tend to read that out in a lot of the later monographic biographies. But you're preaching to convert it because Michelangelo, as I understand it, was very well-posed. Michelangelo was, and I'm not going to use the footballer analogy, Michelangelo was in the absolute extreme 2% of people earning literally thousands and thousands. of ducats. And we recognise how he did that. He did all kinds of deals that were not really available to artists further down the scale. Martin. One aspect of biography we should take on board is that once you've got the idea that art is about artists who surpass their predecessors who have a development, a lot of innocence is lost. You can't be an artist, an ambitious artist,

after Vasari and think, not be anxious about your own development, your own originality and so on. So there's an innocence that has been lost and he's set in motion a kind of devil that ignores away at all subsequent artists. Is there a biography

shaping up? You have to carry your biographer with you. Absolutely. In order to carry your own art forward. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Reverend Welsh and David Excerion and Martin Kemp. Next week we will be talking about the 18th century writer, philosopher and political theorist Edmund Burke, he of reflections on the

revolution in France, which provoked Thomas Paines the rights of man. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as thinking aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four