The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari brings together the world's foremost experts on Vasari as well as up-and-coming scholars to provide, at the 500th anniversary of his birth, a comprehensive assessment of the current state of scholarship on this important - and still controversial - artist and writer. Contributors examine the life and
The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari brings together the world's foremost experts on Vasari as well as up-and-coming scholars to provide, at the 500th anniversary of his birth, a comprehensive assessment of the current state of scholarship on this important-and still controversial-artist and writer. The contributors examine the life and work of Vasari as an artist, architect, courtier, academician, and as a biographer of artists. They also explore his legacy, including an analysis of the reception of his work over the last five centuries. Among the topics specifically addressed here are an assessment of the current controversy as to how much of Vasari's 'Lives' was actually written by Vasari; and explorations of Vasari's relationships with, as well as reports about, contemporaries, including Cellini, Michelangelo and Giotto, among less familiar names. The geographic scope takes in not only Florence, the city traditionally privileged in Italian Renaissance art history, but also less commonly studied geographical venues such as Siena and Venice.
Contents: Introduction, David J. Cast; Vasaris Vite as a collaborative
project, Charles Hope; Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini, Robert Williams; Giorgio
Vasari: artist, designer, collector, Liana di Girolami Cheney; Vasaris Vita
of Giotto, Norman E. Land; Vasaris 1569 Life of Masaccio, Perri Lee Roberts;
Who is the author of Michelangelos Life?, William E. Wallace; Vasaris
literary artifice and the triumph of Michelangelos David, Paul Barolsky;
Bizarre painters and bohemian poets: poetic imitation and artistic rivalry in
Vasaris biography of Piero di Cosimo, Karen Hope Goodchild; Giorgio Vasari
and the art of Siena, Ann C. Huppert; Venice and the perfection of the arts,
Marjorie Och; Giorgio Vasari and Francesco Salviati: friendship and art,
Melinda Schlitt; Rivals with a common cause: Vasari, Cellini and the literary
formulation of the ideal Renaissance artist, Victoria C. Gardner Coates;
Vasari on imitation, Sharon Gregory; Vasari and the rhetoric of decorum,
Robert W. Gaston; Rewriting Vasari, Lisa Pon; Vasaris Lives and the
Victorians, Hilary Fraser; Bibliography; Index.
David J. Cast is Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, USA.