Painting with words

As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari.

Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography, or an art book of any kind. Its sixteenth-century Italian audience probably found it equally genre-defying. Discursive, inaccurate, shot through with an agenda that corrupted objectivity, Vasari’s Lies, as it is often called, is nonetheless indispensible, especially to students of Leonardo da Vinci.
 
Vasari was an artist before he was an artists’ biographer. He was good but never great, and he probably knew it. The Lives, the first edition of which he penned in 1550, assessed fellow Italian artists from the 1300s to the 1500s, among them the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Curiously, the first edition was not illustrated. When Vasari issued his second edition in 1568, pictures were limited to small headshots of each artist rather than reproductions of their works. As Vasari saw it, it was the job of this book to educate by painting pictures in words.
 
The portrait Vasari paints of Leonardo da Vinci is flattering, and obsequious. In his introduction to the artist, Vasari notes that men perceived Leonardo’s genius as God-given. His intellect, Vasari says, was truly marvellous, truly divine. Aside from these magnanimous generalisations, we learn from Vasari that Leonardo loved animals, especially horses and birds, which he’d free from vendors’ cages on a whim. Indeed, Leonardo emerges from Vasari’s pages as something of an eccentric. In one of his characteristically digressive anecdotes, Vasari describes how, upon catching sight of an unusual beard or hairstyle on a passer-by, Leonardo would hurry behind and observe it for as long as possible so that he could write it onto his memory to sketch later in the day. Vasari’s word should never be taken as gospel, but it need not be doubted on this point. Leonardo was especially good at defining long locks of hair, on men as well as women, in paint as well as chalks.
 
Leonardo outstripped his first teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, and arrived at the court of Milan in 1483. Vasari in fact provides the wrong date here for his arrival (which he places a decade later to coincide with the Duke’s official ascension), but he is correct when he says that the artist was summoned initially as a lyre-player. Leonardo’s performance impressed, and the Milanese Duke, Lodovico Sforzo, became his patron.
 
It was in Milan that Leonardo painted his celebrated ‘Last Supper’, a copy of which will be on display as part of the National Gallery exhibition. Vasari notes its beauty, but advises that Leonardo left the head of his Christ imperfect, ‘not thinking it was possible to give that celestial divinity which is required for the representation of Christ’. Since Leonardo’s original fresco is in such disrepair today, Vasari’s account is especially useful here. Leonardo succeeded, Vasari said, in expressing the apostles’ desire to know the identity of the betrayer of Christ, and of rivalling nature with the smaller details, such as the tablecloth. Vasari was particularly interested in the idea that good art could imitate reality to such a degree as to outdo it, or make itself indistinguishable from its model, Leonardo’s ability to do precisely this was worthy of distinction.
 
Vasari is known to have been biased towards the Florentines as supreme masters of art, partly because, unlike the Venetians, he felt they were serious about disegno: preparatory drawing. But Vasari appears a genuine believer in the Florentine Leonardo’s genius (Leonardo in fact hailed from near Vinci, a hilly town just outside the city). He comes across as so comfortable in his praise of the artist, in fact, that he even manages to weave some measured criticism into his account. Leonardo, he says near the end of his chapter, rendered more in words alone than he ever did in tangible, artistic form. Leonardo, Vasari says, could only achieve artistically what of his mind his human hands would allow. As insightful as Vasari’s account of Leonardo is, the magic remains in the reality of the art itself, more than its verbal imitation.
 
Daisy Dunn is a specialist in North Italian Renaissance Art