Vasari. Art, and the Renaissance
The Italian artist, architect, and author Giorgio Vasari was an important influence on the modem Western conception of art. In his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. Sculptors and Architects, a series of biographies of artists published in 1550, Vasari coins a word to describe the art made by the genius Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) and other painters, sculptors, and architects only slightly less talented than Buonarotti: Renaissance (rinascita, or “rebirth,” in Italian). Although the artists Vasari discussed were not the first to take great interest in the art of ancient Greece and Rome-writers and thinkers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries such as Petrareh (1304-1374) and orenzo Valla (1407-1457) had already seen themselves as reinvigorators of the Greck and Roman past-Vasari thought the rebirth of the late fifteenth century had gone beyond the original. In Vasari’s eyes, Buonarotti and his contemporaries were not simply skilled and highly trained artisans, but “rare men of genius”who should sign their name to and take full credit for their work. (Traditionally, artists did not sign their name to art works.) This notion of the artist as creative genius did not apply to all branches of art, but to those in Vasari’s title-painting, sculpture, and architecture-which were subsequently judged to be the major arts. Other types of art, such as needlework porcelain manufacture. goldsmithing and furniture making, were minor arts. decorative arts, or crafts and the names of those who made them were not considered important.
Along with inventing the term “Renaissance”Vasari influenced how Westerners understand other aspects of art and culture. He is often regarded as the first art historian, and his categories continue to shape the way that art history is taught and museums are arranged. Vasari’s term”Renaissance”came to be used for a whole era and not simply its art. Because it derived from broad cultural changes and not specific events, the Renaissance happened at different times in different parts of Europe. “Renaissance” is used to describe fifteenth-century Italian paintings, sixteenth-century English literature, and seventeenth-century Scandinavian architecture. Some scholars see the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern era, while others see it as a sort of a transition between medieval and modem.
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