In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process.The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual "genius" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution.With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.

This book explores the rich literary character and rhetorical strategies of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which tells the story of Italian art as it unfolded from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to its pinnacle in Michelangelo and the art of the Academy in the mid-sixteenth century. The contributors of Reading Vasari propose ways to understand Vasari's text in the light of recent disputes over what is fact, fiction, or biography, and who may have read Vasari's editions when they were first published. The book isolates and analyses select threads from Vasari's luxurious textual tapestry: these range from architecture, cosmology and philosophy to biography, comedy, elegy and travelogue.

Giorgio Vasari''s The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari''s literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari''s villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer''s foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.Approaching Lives on Vasari''s terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari''s motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

Andrew Ladis is Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. Over the course of the last twenty years he has written extensively on Italian art. In addition to books on Taddeo Gaddi and on the Brancacci Chapel, he has made notable contributions to the study of early Italian painting and sculpture with essays on such figures as Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, Jacopo del Casentino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Niccolò di Tommaso. But the range of his interests, made apparent by this collection, extends far beyond fourteenth-century Florence and Siena to encompass Tuscan painting of the fifteenth century, Renaissance maiolica, the writings of Giorgio Vasari, biography, and modern historiography. Further, the assembled essays and book reviews embrace a wide array of art historical problems, such as connoisseurship, patronage, workshop procedure, and the relationship between form and meaning. Of particular note is a major interpretive essay on one of the key monuments of the Renaissance, the mural decoration of the Brancacci Chapel painted by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi. Appearing here in revised form, this study is newly accompanied by a copious number of illustrations, including some never before published.

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process.The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual "genius" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution.With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.

This book explores the rich literary character and rhetorical strategies of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which tells the story of Italian art as it unfolded from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to its pinnacle in Michelangelo and the art of the Academy in the mid-sixteenth century. The contributors of Reading Vasari propose ways to understand Vasari's text in the light of recent disputes over what is fact, fiction, or biography, and who may have read Vasari's editions when they were first published. The book isolates and analyses select threads from Vasari's luxurious textual tapestry: these range from architecture, cosmology and philosophy to biography, comedy, elegy and travelogue.

Giorgio Vasari''s The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari''s literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari''s villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer''s foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.Approaching Lives on Vasari''s terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari''s motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

Andrew Ladis is Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. Over the course of the last twenty years he has written extensively on Italian art. In addition to books on Taddeo Gaddi and on the Brancacci Chapel, he has made notable contributions to the study of early Italian painting and sculpture with essays on such figures as Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, Jacopo del Casentino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Niccolò di Tommaso. But the range of his interests, made apparent by this collection, extends far beyond fourteenth-century Florence and Siena to encompass Tuscan painting of the fifteenth century, Renaissance maiolica, the writings of Giorgio Vasari, biography, and modern historiography. Further, the assembled essays and book reviews embrace a wide array of art historical problems, such as connoisseurship, patronage, workshop procedure, and the relationship between form and meaning. Of particular note is a major interpretive essay on one of the key monuments of the Renaissance, the mural decoration of the Brancacci Chapel painted by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi. Appearing here in revised form, this study is newly accompanied by a copious number of illustrations, including some never before published.