Italian painter, architect and biographer, one of Italy's busiest and most influential Mannerist artists. Born in the Florentine subject city of Arezzo, Giorgio was the child of a potter, and precocious enough for Cardinal Silvio Passerini, guardian of the young Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici, to sponsor his education alongside them in Florence - presumably to act as a provincial spur to their overprivileged laggardliness. Thus began a connection with the Medici that lasted until the death of the steadiest patron of his work as a painter, architect and decorator-of-all-work, the Grand Duke Cosimo I. Thanks to a steady succession of Medicean and papal commissions (interspersed with others from individuals and religious bodies), Vasari produced an immense volume of artistic work, helped by a natural fluency and by teams of capable assistants: both were factors in his contemporary fame as an artist and his subsequent neglect - until quite recently. He was trained in Florence, in the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso and Pontormo, where, above all, he became a Michelangelo idolater.
As a painter his quality can be gauged by the posthumous portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the altarpieceGLOSSARYA picture or sculpture that stands on or is set up behind an altar. The term reredos is used for an ornamental screen or partition, not directly attached to the altar table but affixed to the wall behind it. A diptych is an altarpiece consisting of two panels, a triptych one of three panels, and a polyptych one of four or more panels. From the 14th to 16th century, the altarpiece was one of the most important commissions in European art; it was through the altarpiece that some of the most decisive developments in painting and sculpture came about. of the Immaculate Conception in SS. Apostoli, the decorative schemes in the Salone dei Cinquecento and elsewhere in the Palazzo Vecchio - all in Florence; and by the Sala dei Cento Giorni (Room of the Hundred Days - the time he took to paint it) and the SalaGLOSSARYHall, large room. Regia in Rome: in the PalazzoGLOSSARYPalaces: large urban dwellings, 'palazzo' in Italian carries no regal connotations. Alberti described the palace as a city in little, and, like cities, Italian Renaissance palaces vary in type according to differences of climate, tradition and social structure. On to these regional stocks were grafted new architectural strains, reflecting theoretical reinterpretations of antiquity and individually influential examples. The atrium and peristyle house described by Vitruvius and now known from Pompeii did not survive antiquity, and much of the interest of Renaissance designs lies in creative misunderstandings of Vitruvius's text. Medieval palace architecture probably inherited the insula type of ancient apartment house, related to the modest strip dwellings which never disappeared from Italian cities. In Florence a merchant palace developed from fortified beginnings, with vaulted shop openings on the ground floor, and the main apartments above, reached by internal stone staircases opening from an inner court. Renaissance developments regularized without changing the essential type, although large cloister-like courtyards were introduced, while shops came to be thought undignified. At Michelozzo's Medici Palace (1444) a square arcaded courtyard with axial entrance lies behind a façade of graduated rustication, with biforate windows, a classical cornice replacing the traditional wooden overhang. The apartments on the 'piano nobile' formed interconnecting suites of rooms of diminishing size and increasing privacy. The classical orders which Alberti introduced to the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai (c.1453) were not taken up by the conservative Florentines, who continued to build variations on the Medici Palace (Palazzo Pitti; Palazzo Strozzi). In the 16th century rustication was reduced to quoins and voussoirs, and large windows appeared on the ground floor, 'kneeling' on elongated volutes. At Urbino the Ducal Palace (1465) reflected Alberti's recommendations for the princely palace, and was in turn influential on late 15th century palaces in Rome (e.g. the Cancelleria). A harmonious Florentine courtyard and ample staircase replace the embattled spaces of medieval seigneurial castles, of which vestiges remain only in the towers flanking the balconies of the duke's private apartments, designed as a scholarly retreat. In the absence of a merchant class or a cultured nobility in 15th century Rome, the architectural pace was set by the papal court. Papal incentives to build, and large households, meant less compact plans for cardinals' palaces, often built next to their titular churches. Renaissance forms appear in the unfinished courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia (1460s), with its arcade system derived from the nearby Theatre of Marcellus, and in the delicately ordered stonework of the Cancelleria (1485). In the 16th century vestigial corner towers and shops disappear from cardinals' palaces, and Antonio da Sangallo's Palazzo Farnese (1516) introduces symmetrical planning and Vitrivuan elements, like the colonnaded vestibule, behind a sober Florentine façade, enlivened by Michelangelo's cornice. A smaller palace type supplied the needs of an enlarged papal bureaucracy, more ambitious for display than for domestic accommodation. Bramante's 'House of Raphael' sets the façade style not only for this new type, but also for Renaissance houses all over Europe. Raphael and Peruzzi made ingenious use of difficult sites (Palazzo da Brescia; Palazzo Massimi), and their sophisticated façades flattered the architectural pretensions of patron and pope (e.g. Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila). Movement of patrons and architects, especially after the Sack of Rome, meant a diffusion of Roman forms to central and northern Italy, where Sanmicheli's palaces in Verona, and Palladio's in Vicenza, adapted Roman types to suit local conditions. Palladio's 4-columned atrium is a Vitruvian solution to the traditionally wide Veneto entrance hall, and his plan for the Palazzo da Porto-Festa contains explicit references to Vitruvius's House of the Greeks. In Venice, defended by its lagoon and a stable political system, the hereditary aristocracy built palaces open to trade and festivity on the Grand Canal. The traditional Venetian palace has a tripartite structure: long central halls above entrance vestibules used for unloading merchandise are lit on the canal façade by clusters of glazed windows (rare elsewhere), and at the back from small courts with external staircases (as in the Ca' d'Oro). Codussi's palaces introduced biforate windows and a grid of classical orders into the system, while Sansovino's Palazzo Cornaro retains vestiges of the Venetian type (small courtyard; tripartite façade) despite its Bramantesque coupled orders and licentious window surrounds. Other cities, like Genoa, evolved influential types. Through engravings and the illustrated treatises, Italian Renaissance ideas of palace planning, originally evolved in response to specific conditions, came to be applied all over Europe. della Cancelleria and the Vatican respectively. Some of his principal paintings are in his own house in Arezzo, which is now a museum. He was important in the development of Counter-ReformationGLOSSARYTerm in ecclesiastical history referring to the reform of the entire Church which was widely believed to be necessary as early as the late Middle Ages. Reform programs, such as those passed by the Councils of Constance (1414-1418) and Basle (1431-1437 and 1448) or the 5th Lateran Council (1512-1517), did not achieve any lasting results. Not until the Protestant Reformation were the Pope and Roman Curia forced to take specific action against abuse of position, declining moral standards, the selling of indulgences and excesses in the worship of saints and relics. With the Laetere Jerusalem (1544) bull. Pope Paul III (1534-1549) was responsible for the convocation of the Council of Trent which, in three separate sessions between 15445 and 1563, started the process of inner reform in the Church. iconographyGLOSSARYThe systematic study and identification of the subject-matter and symbolism of art works, as opposed to their style; the set of symbolic forms on which a given work is based. Originally, the study and identification of classical portraits. Renaissance art drew heavily on two iconographical traditions: Christianity, and ancient Greek and Roman art, thought and literature., as in his Immaculate Conception (Florence, SS. Apostoli; sketch in Oxford, Ashmolean), and in elaborate allegories glorifying the Medici Grand Dukes. As an architect he can be judged from the Florentine Uffizi and the Pisan Palazzo dei Cavalieri.
In spite of almost incessant artistic activity he found time to establish a more lasting and far more respected reputation as a writer. In his Le Vite de' più eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects), planned from 1543, published in 1550 and heavily revised in 1568, he wrote the first and still the most influential of all narrative and critical histories of art. The Vite drew on the same philosophical, shaping drive as distinguished the work of the great political historians of his youth, Machiavelli and Guicciardini. They embody the humanist notion that history should instruct and encourage through the record of notable careers and notable achievements: and he humanizes their humanismGLOSSARYphilosophical movement which started in Italy in the mid-14th century, and which drew on antiquity to make man the focal point. In humanism, the formative spiritual attitude of the Renaissance, the emancipation of man from God took place. It went hand in hand with a search for new insights into the spiritual and scientific workings of this world. The humanists paid particular attention to the rediscovery and nurture of the Greek and Latin languages and literature. To this day the term denotes the supposedly ideal combination of education based on classical erudition and humanity based on observation of reality. by infusing the biographies with the spirit of Boccaccio's novellas. Though substituting the pen for the brush, he never pretends not to be a professional artist; the Lives are introduced by a long technical preface on materials and procedures, and they reflect his determination to give his profession a pedigree that would enhance public respect for its practitioners. No other work of the period contains so many independent judgments. Of the facts (gleaned from tours of Italy, correspondence, reading and the questioning of artists or their surviving friends), enough are accurate to ensure the status of the Lives as the quarry from which all histories of Italian Renaissance art must be hewn. The judgments were based on the first developed vocabulary of critical appraisal, with such concepts as proportionGLOSSARYin painting, sculpture and architecture, the ratio between the respective parts and the whole work. The following are important: 1. the Canon of Proportion, a mathematical formula establishing ideal proportions of the various parts of the human body. The unit of measurement is usually the relationship of the head to the torso (1:7 or 1:10); 2. the golden section, a line C divided into a small section A and a larger section B, so that A:B are in the same relationship as B:C; 3. the quadrature, which uses the square as a unit of measurement; 4. triangulation, which uses an equilateral triangle in order to determine important points in the construction; and 5. harmonic proportions, an analogy with the way sounds are produced on stringed instruments, for example an octave = 1:2 (the difference in pitch between two strings, one half the length of the other), a fifth = 2:3, a fourth = 3:4., design and manner being used as a check on the success with which an artist brought his first idea to completion. His book became the model for artistic biographers in other countries, such as van Mander in the Netherlands, Palomino in Spain, and Sandrart in Germany.
Equally revolutionary was his notion of progress in the arts. He did not attempt to press sculpture and architecture into the same pattern, but allowed for their shifting position within a route which painting had followed. When ancient Rome fell, art declined. All the Italians knew of art was the flat, lifeless style derived from Byzantium. Then, around 1250, art was reborn. It grew to maturity in 3 stages. In the first (whose hero was Giotto), artists began to grope towards imitating the colours and forms of nature, the solid physical presence and the expressiveness of the living human body. In the second (whose inspiration was Masaccio), from c. 1400 to c. 1500, they indulged in a riot of experiment, especially in perspectiveGLOSSARYThe method of representing three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. Perspective gives a picture a sense of depth. The most important form of perspective in the Renaissance was linear perspective (first formulated by the architect Brunelleschi in the early 15th century), in which the real or suggested lines of objects converge on a vanishing point on the horizon, often in the middle of the composition (centralized perspective). The first artist to make a systematic use of linear perspective was Masaccio, and its principles were set out by the architect Alberti in a book published in 1436. The use of linear perspective had a profound effect on the development of Western art and remained unchallenged until the 20th century. and anatomy, that brought art's ability to record the real "world almost to fruition, though it retained a certain harsh or rule-fettered flavour. It was in the third period, which included the careers of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, that artists not only mastered nature but triumphed over her. And when the grace and omnicompetence of a painter's hand could go, as Vasari put it, 'beyond the hand of nature', then the art of antiquity had been surpassed and the rebirth of art had led to a career for it of unparalleled achievement.
Vasari's concept of Renaissance invoked a period from the early 14 century to the 1560s when, with Michelangelo dead (in 1564), Vasari himself was left - as he fairly directly implies - to keepGLOSSARYtall, strong tower in medieval castles, used as an observation post and last refuge for those living in the castle, an, unlike the donjon, not designed for permanent habitation. the momentum going on his own. It is far from a coincidence that most subsequent views of 'Renaissance' envisage the same timescale. He saw his 3 phases anthropomorphically, as representing the childhood, youth and maturity of art; the imprint of this implied critical canon has faded, but it determined the value placed upon works of art for centuries.
