Giorgio Vasari's History And Modern Analysis Of The History Of Art

One of the most significant factors which sets the history of art apart from other methods of understanding the past is that it fundamentally lies in the visual spectrum. This feature of the discipline interestingly yields in terms of the most traditional method of categorising art, being authorship. This is even reflected in the language used by art historians when referring to different works. For example a work by Michelangelo may be referred to as ‘a Michelangelo’. Somehow over time the ‘by’ has been lost, this development in itself exhibits the strong connection drawn between a work and it’s creator by the people who study the two.

Awareness of the artist when writing about art is nearly constant even in the earliest art-based texts. From the classical Greek historian Herodotus who mentions the name of craftsmen and architects in passing to later Roman scholars who wrote with a fuller focus on art, the artist has always viewed as significant. The Roman writers Pliny and Pausanias were part of the cultural movement in Rome which fetishised Greece particularly for it’s art(). Thus they wrote as most

His piece, Lives of the Artists, is an incredibly important record for modern analysis of Renaissance art as it is contemporary with some of the art which it records and it can perform as a window into how people viewed art at that time. Vasari, unfortunately, was also purposeful in his recording of ‘great art’ and so he inevitably falls victim to the bias of his time. Thus we see one way in which viewing the artist through the lens of their biography may result in our falling foul of our goal to report events faithfully. If we are to rely on what sources are available for some of the artists whom are privy to some of the greatest scholarly focus, such as Vasari, our view is skewed by his interpretation and thus our conclusions