Introducing Giorgio Vasari - Artificer of Artist as Genius

The Illustrious Giorgio Vasari himself. Self-portrait.
Image courtesy of RasMarley on Flickr Creative Commons

Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artist is in many ways the foundation of Western Art History. Vasari was the first person to sit down and chronicle the lives of individual artists. But more than that, he created the notion that there’s a trajectory in art. He believed Renaissance art should be seen in three periods or stages. Each stage was focused on achieving perfection in art. The third stage, featuring Michelangelo, is to Vasari the paramount of artistic perfection. Even furthering the concept of art as a medium to be studied and explored, he compared artists to each other and began to distinguish between good art and bad.

Interestingly, Vasari didn’t use the word artist while describing artists in his Lives, he preferred the term artifice, meaning artificer. The use of artificer instead of artist or artisan is crucially important as this usage elevates the artist to a larger than life position. Rather than being an ordinary man who works with his hands and is therefore an artisan or other member of the working class, an artificer is a divine creator, a genius. When discussing genius artists Vasari argues that studying art techniques and the human form is not enough. A certain sprezzatura, an easy yet practiced grace, is needed to be a true genius in art and it simply cannot be taught.

For us in the 21^st century, the idea that artists, like Michelangelo and Raphael and many others before and after, are geniuses is completely reasonable as we have been conditioned since Vasari published his Lives that such is the case.  While in Florence we will be reading Vasari’s Lives and I’ll be discussing them here every week, so be sure to tune in. 

Bibliographical Note: The source of all the above information, specifically about Vasari's use of artificer rather than artist, is The Oxford World's Classics edition of Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella.