Art & Architecture - Florence and Tuscany - page 585

GIORGIO VASARI'S 'LIVES OF THE ARTISTS'
Painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was one of those figures rightfully described as
a 'Renaissance man'. Born in Arezzo, he trained as a painter in Florence, working with artists such as
Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo (whome he idolised). As a painter, he is best remembered for his
floor-to-ceiling frescoes in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. As an architect,
his most accomplished work was the elegant loggia of the Uffizi Gallery (he also designed the en-
closed, elevated corridor that connected the Palazzo Vecchio with the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti and was
dubbed the 'Corridoio Vasariano' in his honour). But posterity remembers him predominantly for his
work as an art historian. His Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, from Cim-
abue to Our Time, an encyclopaedia of artistic biographies published in 1550 and dedicated to Cosimo
I de' Medici, is still in print (as The Lives of the Artists ) and is full of wonderful anecdotes and gossip
about his artistic contemporaries in 16th-century Florence.
Memorable passages include his recollection of visiting Donatello's studio one day only to find the
great sculptor staring at his extremely life-like statue of the Prophet Habakkuk and imploring it to talk
(we can only assume that Donatello had been working too hard). Vasari also writes about a young Gi-
otto painting a fly on the surface of a work by Cimabue that the older master then tried to brush away.
Masaccio's Trinity, a wall painting in the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is often
described as one of the founding works of Renaissance painting and the inspiration for
Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper fresco.