We would know very much less about Italian Renaissance Art, and indeed very much less would have been made of the very concept of the Italian Renaissance, had Vasari not published his Lives of the Artists in 1550 (and again, revised and enlarged, in 1567), providing us with biographies of more than two hundred Italian artists. A good place to reflect on the nature of Vasari's achievement is the Uffizi in Florence. Many of the Renaissance pictures in the gallery there were first described by him. The niches outside are occupied by statues of great Tuscan artists, placed there in the 19th century - Vasari would have approved of such a commemorative initiative, and indeed he may have inspired it. Vasari was also the architect of the building itself. The lucid elevations, the combination of solemn grandeur and ceremony with rational order which they suggest, masked the stealthy despotism and expressed the new bureaucratic regularity imposed on the city by Cosimo de' Medici, Duke of Florence and then first Grand-Duke of Tuscany, whom Vasari served, and to whom the Lives was dedicated.

LRB 16 November 1995 | PDF Download