Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives

by Andrew Ladis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469626031
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Series:	Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Andrew Ladis (1949-2007) was Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. His previous books include The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop and, in four volumes, Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art: An Anthology of Literature.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface Chapter 1. The Sorcerer's "O" (and the Painter Who Wasn't There)
Chapter 2. Hagiography and Obloquy for a Silver Age Chapter 3. Perugino and the Wages of Fortune Chapter 4. Identity and Imperfection in the Shadow of Michelangelo Envoi Notes Selected Bibliography Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Explores the way in which the Lives operates at one level as a Counter-Reformation morality tale, in which artistic heroes are played off against zeroes who failed through their own vices. . . . Ladis is quite right to insist on the moralism of the Lives .--Times Literary Supplement

Fascinating. . . . Fluid, elegant, jargon-free prose. . . as pleasant and enjoyable to read as Vasari's own famous work.--Barnes & Noble Review

A perceptive and nuanced account of Vasari.--Renaissance Quarterly

This is an account of what can be called the counter-demonstrations in the moral record of Vasari, full of stories of artists like Buffalmacco, Fra Filippo Lippi, Castagno, and Baccio Bandinelli. It is at once amusing and deeply serious, written with elegance and a wonderful sense of the tradition of Italian storytelling that Vasari used in his own inimitable narrative.--David Cast, Bryn Mawr College

You cannot come away from Victims and Villians in Vasari's Lives and not want to go back to the source and read it again. . . . Gives the devils their due, just as Vasari intended.--Art Blog by Bob

Andrew Ladis's essays are pure gold. He offers an insightful, learned, and historical interpretation of Vasari's book that is also poetic and often deeply moving. At the same time, he presents a nuanced analysis of some of Vasari's larger themes. This is the best, most rewarding work on any subject by an art historian that I have read in a long while.--Norman E. Land, University of Missouri-Columbia

[An] exceptionally readable and revealing commentary. . . . [A] decisively bold, generously detailed, and essential supplement to Vasari's writings.--Comitatus

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written.--H-Italy

Ladis [has] a sharp eye for inventions by Vasari and manipulation of reputation.-- Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

From the Publisher