Vasari. Art, and the Renaissance

The Italian artist, architect, and author Giorgio Vasari was an important influence on the modem Western conception of art. In his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. Sculptors and Architects, a series of biographies of artists published in 1550, Vasari coins a word to describe the art made by the genius Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) and other painters, sculptors, and architects only slightly less talented than Buonarotti: Renaissance (rinascita, or “rebirth,” in Italian). Although the artists Vasari discussed were not the first to take great interest in the art of ancient Greece and Rome-writers and thinkers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries such as Petrareh (1304-1374) and orenzo Valla (1407-1457) had already seen themselves as reinvigorators of the Greck and Roman past-Vasari thought the rebirth of the late fifteenth century had gone beyond the original. In Vasari’s eyes, Buonarotti and his contemporaries were not simply skilled and highly trained artisans, but “rare men of genius”who should sign their name to and take full credit for their work. (Traditionally, artists did not sign their name to art works.) This notion of the artist as creative genius did not apply to all branches of art, but to those in Vasari’s title-painting, sculpture, and architecture-which were subsequently judged to be the major arts. Other types of art, such as needlework porcelain manufacture. goldsmithing and furniture making, were minor arts. decorative arts, or crafts and the names of those who made them were not considered important.

Along with inventing the term “Renaissance”Vasari influenced how Westerners understand other aspects of art and culture. He is often regarded as the first art historian, and his categories continue to shape the way that art history is taught and museums are arranged. Vasari’s term”Renaissance”came to be used for a whole era and not simply its art. Because it derived from broad cultural changes and not specific events, the Renaissance happened at different times in different parts of Europe. “Renaissance” is used to describe fifteenth-century Italian paintings, sixteenth-century English literature, and seventeenth-century Scandinavian architecture. Some scholars see the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern era, while others see it as a sort of a transition between medieval and modem.

Vasari’s distinction between art(works made by “rare men of genius”) and craft(works made by everyone else) has been extended to other cultural realms in Europe: certain forms of writing, such as poetry, history, and epics, came to be defined as literature, while other types of writing, such as letters and diaries, were excluded from this category; certain forms of music became classical, while everything else was popular or folk: instruction that occurred in institutional settings was education, while that going on in the family or workshop was training or tradition. Scholars traced a growing split between professional and amateur, and, to a lesser degree, between learned and popular culture.

Research into all aspects of cultural life over the last several decades, however, has pointed out that the divisions between art and craft and learned and popular are more pronounced in hindsight than they were at the time. Vasari may have prized painting. sculpture, and architecture but patrons carefully ordered and paid enormous amounts for candlesticks, silver and gold tableware enamel or jewel- encrusted dishes, embroidery (cloth with decorative needlework), and enormous tapestries, along with paintings and statues. Embroiderers as well as painters experimented with perspective (the representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane: paid great attention to proportion. shadowing, and naturalistic representation: and took their subjects from Greek and Roman antiquity. Writers paid as much, or even more, attention to literary conventions (standard practices) in their letters than in their poctry or drama. Folktales told orally for centuries became part of literary works in many countries, and people telling stories increasingly included those that someone had read in a book. Highly learned individuals participated in festivities involving all kinds of people that poked fun at their own intellectual pretensions and satirized various forms of power and status. Educated individuals did form a community among themselves with concerns different from the vast majority of the population, but they also shared many values and traditions with their neighbors who lacked extensive formal education.