Giorgio Vasari: Art and History Hardcover – April 26, 1995 by Patricia Lee Rubin (Yale University Press)

Though only modestly talented, Vasari won immortality through the publication of his Lives of the Artists. In her erudite but accessible analysis of that magnum opus, Rubin lovingly and brilliantly elucidates the essence of the writer's achievement. In addition to eliciting the substance of his canonic figures from his own youthful experiences, Rubin also educes an ideal self-portrait, which is implicit in the Lives. Not only are Vasari's research methodology, historiographic models, aesthetic predispositions, and relationship to the contemporary literary context exactingly exhumed but the broader historical and conceptual vision of the expanded edition of 1568 is cannily exfoliated. The elaborated studies of the lives of Giotto, Donatello, and Raphael make manifest Vasari's schema of artistic progress and his notion of the relationship of the artist's character and stylistic personality. Collections concerned with Renaissance historiography and art criticism will require this volume.?

Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects are and always have been central texts for the study of the Italian Renaissance. They can and should be read in many ways. Since their publication in the mid-sixteenth century, they have been a source of both information and pleasure. Their immediacy after more than four hundred years is a measure of Vasari's success. He wished the artists of his day, himself included, to be famous. He made the association of artistry and genius, of renaissance and the arts so familiar that they now seem inevitable. In this book Patricia Rubin argues that both the inevitability and the immediacy should be questioned. To read Vasari without historical perspective results in a limited and distorted view of The Lives.
Rubin shows that Vasari had distinct ideas about the nature of his task as a biographer, about the importance of interpretation, judgment, and example - about the historian's art. Vasari's principles and practices as a writer are examined here, as are their sources in Vasari's experiences as an artist.

Patricia Lee Rubin is Lecturer in Renaissance Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.