In May 1547 Paolo Giovio predicted that his friend Giorgio Vasari’s recent paintings would be consumed by saltpetre and worms, but that his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects would make him immortal. Five centuries after Vasari’s birth on 30th July 1511, even though many of his paintings still survive and, among his architectural projects, that for the Uffizi is celebrated, his fame is solidly based on his book.1 It is by no means clear that he would have welcomed this because he always seems to have seen himself primarily as a painter. In his self-­portrait in the Uffizi (if it is indeed a self-portrait) he is shown making a drawing, but there is nothing in it to indicate that he was also a prolific writer. Yet, despite the great success that he achieved in his chosen career, his paintings attracted few admirers after his death, whereas his book, first published in 1550 and again in a much expanded form in 1568, remains in print in many editions and translations and has justly earned him the title of the father of art history.2

Vasari’s success in attracting powerful and generous patrons is something of a mystery, given the modest quality of his work. His ability to fulfil the most demanding commissions rapidly and efficiently was evidently an important factor. But probably equally important was the fact that Vasari, who was familiar with a much wider range of Italian art than any of his patrons, was regarded, with justification, as being an expert whose judgment in artistic matters could be trusted.

From very early Vasari’s book, which was and is mainly read in its 1568 edition, attracted criticism, both for the supposed Tuscan bias and the historical mistakes. Such criticisms seem particularly unfair. Living in Florence and Arezzo, and with access to an impressive range of written sources on Tuscan art, which he exploited to the full, Vasari also included a vast amount of information about art in other parts of Italy and even abroad. He could have hardly provided much more material of this type, unless he had been in receipt of a substantial research grant instead of having to earn his living through his painting and architecture.

While the traditional criticisms of Vasari continue to be made, in recent decades his book has been increasingly praised for its literary qualities and for the apparent sophistication of the ideas that it contains. Such claims are all the more surprising given Vasari’s inexperience as a writer when he began the project and the fact that his autograph letters, of which more than two hundred survive, almost all dating from after 1550, provide no indication that he possessed any significant literary ability. In this respect the writer of the letters and the writer of the Lives, or at least of large parts of the Lives, seem to be different people. This problem has been surprisingly little discussed by scholars, while the obvious differences in style between individual lives, which is particularly marked in the first edition, is usually explained by rather vague references to sixteenth-century rhetorical conventions, or to the intervention of different editors. But it is difficult to think of close parallels in other books of the period, or to understand what bearing rhetoric could have in such matters as the different spellings of artists’ names and place names that appear in different lives, or to apparent differences in historical knowledge or in ways in which individual works of art are described. Nor is it clear how all such dif­ferences could be due to editorial intervention, one of whose purposes is normally to reduce or eliminate such inconsistencies.

Apart from the fundamental and still unsurpassed study of Vasari’s use of earlier written sources by Wolfgang Kallab, published in 1908, little attention has been devoted to the question of how the book was actually written. The first edition of the Lives, amounting to almost three hundred thousand words, seems to have been largely composed in about a year, during which Vasari was also highly productive as a painter. It has often been suggested that he began the book before 1546, the date indicated in his autobiography, but this is difficult to reconcile with the very cursory treatment in the first edition of art in Naples, where he had just spent about ten months. It is unclear how long it took to write the second edition, which is about one and a half times as long as War and Peace; but during its preparation Vasari was heavily involved in the decoration of Palazzo Vecchio and other projects.

Vasari, then, was apparently both a very prolific but not very gifted painter, and at the same time a writer of extraordinary skill, at home in a bewildering variety of different styles, except in his own letters, and indeed in his unfinished Ragionamenti, which incorporates a great deal of unacknowledged textual material by other writers. At the same time, he was supposedly capable of writing at astonishing speed, about fourteen times faster, for example, than Benvenuto Cellini when composing the auto­biography he wrote while under house arrest.

How both editions of the Lives were compiled and written has yet to be adequately explained. Since the book must reflect the information collected by Vasari himself or provided by others, one way forward would be to analyse in detail what his text tells us, or omits, about each building and city that he mentions. Such an approach would certainly provide new insights into how the book was compiled, especially as Vasari’s own movements are so well documented. His book is such an indispensable source of historical information about Italian art, and of information about the ways in which it was discussed in the sixteenth century, that we need a more coherent and historically plausible explanation than the current belief that Vasari was the most prolific and protean writer in the history of Western art. Perhaps that was indeed the case, but it now needs to be demonstrated rather than taken on trust.

1    Vasari’s architectural designs for the Uffizi and his relations with his patron Cosimo de’ Medici are explored in an exhibition at the Galleria degli Uffizi running from 14th June to 30th October. In Arezzo, where Vasari was born, a loan exhi­bition of his paintings is on view at Palazzo Vescovile (to 30th December).
2    A small testimony to the continuing fame of the Lives is the fact that Vasari is mentioned and cited fifteen times in the articles in this issue.