The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

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van Mander, Carel. 1969. Dutch and Flemish Painters, Carel van Mander. Translation and Introduction Constant van de Wall. 1936. Reprint, New York, N.Y.: Arno Press. This book took me a relatively long time to finish. It is far from neutral and Vasari’s judgment is sometimes obviously (more on that in the film I recommend at the end of this review). Of course, it can get boring at times when reading of an artist you never heard about and going through long passages on his work, and from what I understand, this edited version doesn’t even include all the artists he wrote about. but the language (or translation) is surprisingly fluent for a book almost 500 years old, and one shouldn’t forget that Vasari had almost no art history source to study from or professional methods of writing about art to follow. Spending time in Vasari's romantic renaissance universe is at times very satisfying and at times just tedious. If you want to know what is true and what has been debunked, you have to read the footnotes as well. Working for the Zoli modelling agency (available for “special bookings only”), Warhol sold his celebrity to various companies for product endorsements in television and print, giving a sense of inevitability to his early Pop appropriations of such banal products as Brillo scrubbing pads and Campbell’s soup. Whether he was modelling Levi’s blue jeans, advertising tdk videotapes, l.a.Eyeworks, or the ill-fated Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond trading firm, or guest-starring on an episode of The Love Boat, these vulgar commercial activities were part of the logical culmination of Warhol’s trajectory. “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I wanted to be an art businessman or a Business Artist.” Giorgio was a Mannerist painter who was highly regarded both as a painter and architect in his day, but rather less so in later centuries. He was effectively what would now be called the minister of Culture to the Medici court in Florence, and the Lives promoted, with enduring success, the idea of Florentine superiority in the visual arts.

It is not only art historians who are to blame. Artists have always been granted a different status from the rest of the populace, and were, consequently, treated differently. They could speak to the gods. They were given privileged positions, disregarding traditional class divisions. As an inverted barometer for societal values, artists could safely act out fantasies, break the taboos and enjoy the indulgences that are shunned by the moral consensus. The figure of the artist possessed a unique duality, eliciting equal doses of fascination and contempt, envy and disdain. Vasari included a short autobiography at the end of the Lives, and added further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati. [8] There’s no doubt of the historic importance of the book. It was the first history of art ever written, and though it only treated Italian art (and even there tended to favor somewhat chauvinistically Florentine artists), the Introductionmany portraits from life executed with beautiful grace and a good manner. NOTES. I., line 1, p. 187. If you ever plan to visit Florence, Italy, read this book before you go. Knowing some information about the artists, their methods, their contemporaries, and their intentions can help make the mountains of Renaissance art here more meaningful (and less likely to start to blur together after a couple of the museums). Vasari errs on the side of praising, at least in the chapters that I've read, and he loves Michaelangelo almost to a fault, but since he was once signed up to be an assistant to Michaelangelo, his bias also lends credence to some of his claims. There are even points that were disputed after the first edition of the book that are corrected along the lines of "I asked Michaelangelo about this, and he said that..." I found Vasari's narratives helped me to put two and two together in artistic developments that are scattered across several cathedrals and museums--so it's easier to see the influence between the paintings in this chapel and the painting done somewhere else later. Often called "the first art historian", [15] 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 Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). This work was first published in 1550 and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. Vasari introduced the term "Rinascita" (rebirth in Italian) in printed works – although an awareness of an ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti. Vasari's term, applied to the change in artistic styles with the work of Giotto, eventually would become the French term Renaissance (rebirth) widely applied to the era that followed. Vasari was responsible for the modern use of the term Gothic art, as well, although he only used the word Goth in association with the German style that preceded the rebirth, which he identified as "barbaric". Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. 1969. Born Under Saturn. The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution. London/New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company. Meurer, Susanne (2006). " 'In Verlegung des Autoris': Joachim von Sandrart and the Seventeenth-Century Book Market". The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 7 (4): 419–449. ProjectMUSE 209221.

O listen to the malignant Vasari, he says that the rivals of Titian were not men of valor when these … all … were painters of great importance.” Despite the ease with which we merge the figure of Warhol with today’s entertainment-obsessed society, there is little interpretation of the relationship between his construction of his persona and its direct impact on his art. The campaign to isolate and dismiss the importance of Warhol’s persona in terms of his overall artistic contribution is much more systematic in recent academic writing. Scholarly publications such as October attempt to sort out the persona problem by historicising Warhol into two distinct periods: the Early Factory Years (1960–8) and the Business Art Years (1969–87). Art historian and film theorist Annette Michelson has chosen the term ‘prelapsarian’ to characterise the first period. This biblical allusion perfectly sums up the notion of an evil that caused Warhol’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. ‘After 1968,’ she writes, ‘Warhol assumed the role of grand couturier, whose signature sells or licenses perfumes… Warhol’s ‘Business art’ found its apogee in the creation of a label that could be affixed.’ While the pre-1968 Factory certainly flirted with celebrity and the mainstream vehicles of fame, it did so under critical auspices. For Michelson, the prelapsarian Warhol reflected the ills of mainstream culture through irony-soaked parody. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volumes I and II. Everyman's Library, 1996. ISBN 0-679-45101-3In 1550 he published his book Lives of the Artists – in full, Le Vite de’ Più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, ed Architettori (The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects).

Nochlin, Linda. 1973. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?. In Art and Sexual Politics, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth Baker, pp. 194–205. New York, N.Y.: Collier Books. In Rome, he painted frescos in the Sala Regia. Among his better-known pupils or followers are Sebastiano Flori, Bartolomeo Carducci, Mirabello Cavalori (Salincorno), Stefano Veltroni (of Monte San Savino), and Alessandro Fortori (of Arezzo). [11]Jacopo Sansovino with Andrea Palladio, Alessandro Vittoria, Bartolomeo Ammannati and Danese Cattaneo Michelangelo being beaten by his father and older brothers as a youth because he was so obsessed with drawing. A rival artist, Torrigiano, later breaking his nose out of jealousy so badly it marked Michelangelo for life.