Giorgio Vasari and "Che cosa sia disegno"

This article was prompted by a review written by Giovanni Mazzaferro and posted on his excellent blog 'letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com. As the name of the blog implies, he concerns himself with reviewing books on art, often Italian books and, for anyone interested, although the articles are written in Italian, there is always an English version as well.

The review in question (in three installments) is of a new edition of Vasari's principal literary work: Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Edizioni dell'Orso, 2017) 1. As usually happens with me after reading one of Mazzaferro's reviews, I wanted to buy the book he was discussing but also, as sometimes happens, yet another one to which he had referred in the course of his article, namely: Diligenza e Prestezza - La tecnica nella pittura e nella letteratura artistica del Cinquecento, by Angela Cerasuolo. I say book but, although published only in 2014, I was unable to find a copy of an actual book, not even in Italy: a PDF is available however and that's what I ended-up purchasing.

Angela Cerasuolo's book concerns, as the Italian sub-title suggests, Renaissance painting techniques as they are recounted in the contemporary literature 2. Obviously, one of the principal sources is in fact, Giorgio Vasari's 'Vite', as it is known in Italian, or 'Lives', in English. This great and fundamental work, telling the lives of the great and lesser artists from Cimabue up to almost the time of Vasari's own death in 1574 has been, and still is, possibly the most important and basic reference for subsequent art historians dealing with the periods he discusses. One part of Vasari's text which interests Cerasuolo is the Introduzzione alle Tre Arti del Disegno cioè Architettura Pittura e Scoltura 3, and specifically, because as such, as an introduction for the lay reader, it was a novel and unique contribution. In that introduction, in the part called Della Pittura (About Painting), Giorgio discusses what drawing is; Che cosa sia disegno. Although the Lives is most widely known and appreciated for its more or less accurate biographies of artists, when writing it Vasari decided that, for the uninitiated, an explanation of the techniques and materials used in the three major disciplines, Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, might be helpful. Che cosa sia disegno is the sub-heading with which Vasari begins his treatment of the art of Painting.

I want to discuss this section, Che cosa sia disegno, which, I have discovered is a difficult passage to make sense of 4. To begin, it should perhaps be pointed out that Vasari lived during the Renaissance - that part of it sometimes referred to as the High Renaissance - and its transition into the next period known to art history as Mannerism; in fact, Giorgio, himself regarded as a Mannerist, used the term "maniera" (another expression worthy of some decoding!) in the Lives on numerous occasions. The time in which Vasari was growing up, studying and writing is important because of the influence contemporary Humanist philosophy had on his thought, and his language. One dominant philosophical current at the time was what is referred to as Neoplatonism; it is not necessary to go into detail about that, except to point out the Platonic notion of the 'Idea' or 'Form'. In essence, nothing as we perceive it in the natural world is as perfect and whole as is the (ideal) 'Form' of that thing; the Idea or Form, whether it existed in the mind of a deity or in some other condition, was always the perfect 'form' of anything, including man, and although people might strive to produce the most beautiful and perfect works possible, approximation to the Idea or Form was the best that could be hoped for: perfection itself was ultimately unattainable. Giorgio uses the words 'idea' and 'form' in ways which are sometimes confusing as they could refer to a simple idea that one has in one's head, or to the Platonic concept, i.e. the unattainable 'Idea'. In the first paragraph, Vasari uses the term 'idea' twice, perhaps once in each of the aforementioned senses - perhaps only in the Platonic sense. This reference to the pagan philosopher Plato is in itself of note as, together with the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman art, this change in focus, from Christian cosmology to the world of human beings - through the lens of Classical culture, literature and art - brought about a slow but complete break with Medieval views. Although there is a spiritual or metaphysical aspect to the concept of the Form or Idea, the significant outcome, as far as the figurative arts were concerned, was the direction of the artists' attention away from symbolic, stylized representations of human figures 5, especially as this applied to 'sacred' images, and towards representing the perfect human body (and the natural world in general), guided by Nature and the ideal Form.

The following is a translation (with alternatives in brackets) of the first paragraph of Che cosa sia disegno, admittedly in a possibly annoying way, but this because I wanted to show the extent of ambiguity inherent in Giorgio's definition of drawing - included in which by the way, is the all-important notion that making art objects is essentially an intellectual activity, or at least, that drawing (as invention) is:

"Because (or, since) drawing (disegno), father of our three arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, proceeding from (or, through) the intellect, derives (or, obtains) of many things a universal (applicable to all natural things) judgement (or, awareness; or opinion - understood as a critical faculty), similar to (i.e. based on) a form (Form), that is idea (Idea) of all things of nature, ( ....) from here it is that, not only human bodies and those of animals, but in plants as well, and in buildings and sculptures and pictures, it (drawing?) knows (is aware of) the proportion which the whole has (relative) to the parts, and the parts have (relative) to each other, and to the whole; and because from this awareness (of proportion) is born a certain concept (general idea or plan) and judgement (opinion), which forms itself in the mind, which then, expressed with the hands, is called drawing (disegno), we can conclude that drawing is nothing other than the visible expression and statement of the concept that one (the artist) has in his (or her) soul, and of that which others have imagined in (their) mind(s) and made in the idea (i.e. constructed an idea, image, concept of any given object in their minds or souls; or, fabricated in (from) the Idea [?])" The paragraph concludes with a reference to a Greek proverb: 'Dell'ugna un leone" (From a claw, a lion), which demonstrates that from a well-formed or well-represented part - a lion's claw for example - in an unfinished sculpture (or painting), the whole 'idea' (of the animal in this case) can be generated (i.e. by the skill of the artist) in the mind of the viewer (because the part is indicative of the known whole. i.e. Form or Idea in the Platonic sense).

Before taking a closer look at the content of the quoted paragraph, it may be helpful to point out that the very word 'disegno' is also problematical, being sometimes translated in English as 'drawing', sometimes as 'design'. Although the dictionary (OED) definition of 'design' certainly means 'drawing' as we understand it in the modern sense, it seems to me that Vasari does in fact use the word in both the English senses, i.e. drawing and design; for me as a painter, these two words have quite different meanings. Until the advent of modern technology, design, which may be described as the 2D visual laying out or planning of some scheme (a building, a town plan, a pot, a circuitry, a painting), was basically impossible without drawing. As Vasari says in his first paragraph, drawing makes visible that which is in the mind of the person making it (the drawing). However, it is definitely possible to do a drawing which is not a design: sketches, portraits, occasional jottings, etc. are not designs although they may eventually become such. Sketches made by any number of Renaissance masters are not regarded as designs (in modern English), unless perhaps they are of architecture; in fact, they are referred to as "old master drawings". One universal characteristic of drawings is the major and fundamental use of line. The under-drawings (sinopia) of, for example, Andrea dal Castagno's frescos in Sant'Apollonia 6 in Florence may be made with a brush but they are still, nevertheless, drawings, precisely because they are dependent on line (and not mass) as the conduit between what was in the mind of the artist at the time and what the viewer now sees. The usual significance therefore of Vasari's word 'disegno' in this first paragraph would seem to be drawing, understood as a physical visual expression dependent primarily on line, on any 2D surface (a definition which may serve also for design except that designs can be 3D on occasion).

In the translated paragraph, Vasari is discussing the acquired or learnt ability to look at any natural or man-made object and form opinions and judgements (about size, shape, proportion, relationship, etc.) concerning such objects which, when expressed visually through drawing, tally or agree with the generally held opinion or idea of what such objects actually look like. However, as an a priori point of view, it seems that Giorgio also includes references to the ideal Forms or Ideas as conceived of by the neoplatonist Humanists of his day. His first paragraph can be read in the light of such concepts, particularly as it is, at best, unclear when he uses the terms 'idea' and 'form' (and 'concept') whether or not his intention is the prosaic meanings of these terms, or the Platonic ones. He defines drawing as an expression of pre-existing 'concepts', albeit - if he is referring to the Ideas or Forms - ones which cannot ever be fully realised as physical representation; it seems that initially, the 'concepts' of what the artist wishes to represent exist in his or her mind and are manifested in drawings in such a way as to correlate (rather closely) with the same concepts which exist in the minds of viewers. It is not clear if Vasari means concepts, general ideas, in the artist's mind which correlate with those in the minds of others, perhaps people commissioning a work of art for a church for example; or whether he is referring to concepts as Ideas in the neoplatonic sense, unchanging Ideas (Forms) which are common to all mankind, a kind of absolute reference for, in our case, figurative art.

One extremely important aspect of his understanding of the process of drawing is that it passes through, or proceeds from, the intellect ("... il disegno, ... procedendo dall'intelletto, ..."). This point of view was critical to Vasari and others as they asserted the right of the figurative arts to be considered on the same level as poetry and literature, amongst other liberal arts. What they were seeking was a change in social status from mere craftsman to intellectual. To this end, Vasari bases his definition on this premise, that drawing, and therefore art, comes from the use of the intellect and is not simply the result of an acquired manual skill; as Michelangelo said, "Si dipinge col cervello et non con le mani." ("One paints with the brain and not with the hands"). It may be remarked in this regard that Vasari's desire was obviously conditioned by the social structure of the times, a structure slowly evolving out of the very hierarchical one of the Middle Ages.

Vasari's use of the word 'concetto' (concept) in the first paragraph seems to mean both idea and concept, in the more usual sense of general scheme or plan; in the second paragraph, it (concetti) seems to have this more general meaning as well. In any case, it appears that the difficult part of drawing is not the technical side - the use of materials, the manipulative skill, acquired through "lo studio et essercizio di molti anni" ("the study and practice of many years") - but rather the slow acquisition of a critical faculty or, in other words, the ability and capacity to measure in the mind the relative proportions of objects and their relations to the whole. Thus, drawing requires highly-trained and experienced hands which are capable of diligently and quickly representing well whatever nature (and man) has created; because, when the intellect "sends out" the "purified" ('purgati" by or with judgement) concepts ("concetti"), those hands "che hanno molti anni essercitato il disegno", i.e. with their many years of practice, make known (to the world) the perfection and excellence of the arts, as well as the knowledge of the artist: the correct and purified concepts produce not only good work but show off the value of the arts and the skill of the artist ("l'artefice" in Vasari's Italian).

In the first paragraph, Vasari includes the role of the viewer ("quello che altri si è nella mente imaginato", i.e. "that which others have imagined in the [their] mind[s]") as an implied yardstick of the success or otherwise of an artist's work. If the drawing - understood as any work of art - does not convince the viewer by stimulating in his or her mind the 'concept' or 'idea' as they had originally conceived of it, then the work has not succeeded. This must be considered bearing in mind the contemporary view that the artist's job was to 'imitate' Nature, understood as the perceptible real physical world of which human beings are a part; to varying degrees however: for Alberti 7 and Vasari, it was necessary to select the 'best' parts of nature to compose an Ideal form; for Leonardo da Vinci, selection, in theory, had little or no role. Naturally, how different people saw nature depended on many factors, not least their own visual literacy in art (which attempts to represent or imitate that nature). In the end of course, this very varied - and almost limitless - condition raises the question, apparently unanswered in neoplatonic philosophy, of who exactly it is who will judge that some artwork or other matches or not the Idea or Form; given that it is a concept and therefore itself not visible, the Platonic notion of the Idea or Form is a kind of cyclical argument, an untestable thesis which by its own definition cannot be examined! 8 Incidentally, in relation to the imitation of Nature, whereas, in the academic schools of the 19th century such ideas were taken to the extreme (actually quite different in their products to those of the Renaissance), needless to say, since the beginning of the 20th century, a substantial portion of the art produced cannot be measured by those same yardsticks!

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Mention might also be made here of the curious fact that the 1550 version of the 'Lives' was entitled  Le vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri: descritte in lingua toscana, da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino. Con una sua utile & necessaria introduzzione a le arti loro; -  in English: "The lives of the most excellent Italian architects, painters and sculptors, from Cimabue up to our times: described in the Tuscan language, by Giorgio Vasari painter from Arezzo. With (its) his useful and necessary introduction to their arts." (first published in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino, hence known among Italian scholars as the 'Torrentiniana' version); whereas, in 1568 , the hierarchy of the arts is swapped around and Vasari called the new edition Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (again published in Florence but this time by Giunti, hence known in Italy as the 'Giuntina'). A couple of minor observations, first: the spelling of 'architects' is different in the two titles and secondly, the 1568 title is much abbreviated, omitting especially the word "italiani" and the fact that it is written in "lingua toscana"9.

But the main difference is in the order of the arts, or artists, themselves. In the 17 or so years between the two editions of his book (at the very beginning of the dedication to the second edition, Vasari states: "Ecco, dopo diciassette anni ch'io presentai ...", i.e.  " ... after 17 years (from) when I presented (to you) ..."), something had changed - as might be expected - in Vasari's thinking. Whereas in the 1550 edition, 'architetti' were mentioned first, in the 1568 edition, 'pittori' were in first place! Keeping in mind that Vasari was himself both painter (pittore) and architect (architetto/architettore), and also that one of the liveliest debates amongst writers, intellectuals and the artists themselves (for instance, Michelangelo and da Vinci) concerned the relative 'nobiltà' (nobility) of the various arts, and especially of painting and sculpture, is it possible that, having opted for the primacy of painting over sculpture, he then decided to emphasize the point by rearranging the word order of his title?

In this relation, it can be noted that Michelangelo, despite being a painter and a sculptor (and architect), thought sculpture a superior endeavour to painting; da Vinci, on the other hand, who was as well a painter, sculptor and architect (among much else), thought painting the more noble art. This was such a serious matter at the time that many writers expressed their opinions on the subject and indeed, conferences were held and at least one survey conducted of painters and sculptors to try to resolve the question. However, naturally one might say, most painters thought their art the superior one, and most sculptors, theirs! Interestingly, for me at least, one of the principal criteria of superiority and differentiation was 'difficulty', i.e. the degree of effort (fatica) required to produce either a painting or a sculpture. This is interesting because it involves in part the technical skill of the artist, in other words, his or her manual dexterity; Vasari and others had spread a lot of ink over a lot of pages trying to demonstrate that the figurative arts were  essentially 'intellectual' in nature, as we can see from the discussion above regarding 'disegno' 10. It seems however, that many artists of his time were still quite happy to argue on the basis of manual skill, or the artisan aspect, of their profession; sculpture especially required a lot of heavy - and dirty - manual labor, particularly if we think about chiselling away at a piece of stone (usually marble), or the difficult and dangerous process of pouring molten metals (usually bronze) to cast statues.

In sculpture, the fact that many works 'in the round' - of human figures normally - did not so much 'imitate' nature, in the way a painting does, but made a 3D copy of the real thing, such that a viewer could actually walk around the work, just as we can walk around another person, was seen as one of its claims to superiority. Sculptors argued that painting was a mere imitation, an illusion on a flat surface. This very same criticism was used by painters to demonstrate the superior skill of painting, since painters were able to show distant mountains, lakes, beautiful skies and so on, as well as human figures, using colour and to 'suggest' the roundness of forms, be they natural or man-made, such as to be able to trick the eye, therefore requiring far more skill, precisely because all this was done on a 2D surface!

1 'The lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects' by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). Edition directed by Enrico Mattioda; it is from this edition that I am reading and to which I refer for this article. Vasari published two editions, one in 1550 (known as the Torrentiniana) and a subsequently updated one in 1568 (known as the Giuntina). As well as being probably the most quoted of all Italian art historians, Vasari was a prolific painter and architect, his best known building being the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I confess that, until recently, I had had very little time for him as a painter, finding his work overdone and rhetorical; lately however, I have come to appreciate his 'domestic' works more fully and more in keeping with my deep respect for him as a historian.

2 Angela Cerasuolo also refers just as often to other writers of the period including: Cennino Cennini (Il Libro dell'Arte), Raffaello Borghini (Il Riposo), Francesco Melzi (Codice Vaticano Urbinate lat 1270, c.1540-1550), Benedetto Varchi (Due Lezzioni, 1549), Alessio Piemontese (De Secretis, 1555) and Giovan Battista Armenini (De' veri precetti della pittura) among many others. She also refers to another English translation of the technical/theoretical descriptions given by Vasari, a book published in 1907 by Dent & Company called Vasari on Technique. It was written by two people, Professoer G. Baldwin Brown, who edited the work and wrote the introduction and notes, and Louisa S. Maclehose who did the translation.

3 'Introduction to the three arts of drawing, that is Architecture Painting and Sculpture', the Introduction to Vasari's 'Lives of the most excellent painters, etc.' (Giuntina). I note here that an interesting feature of Vasari's writing is the inconsistency of his spelling! The varied spelling of commonly used words in the Lives, such as 'sculpture' and 'Michelangelo', has led some critics to deduce that certain parts were written by people other than Vasari. Vasari was aided in his vast endeavour by numerous correspondents and it is possible that, in transcribing their information, he simply adopted their spellings. It is interesting in this regard to compare the writing and spelling in the Lives with those in Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte (written sometime between the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries). For example, in the Lives, words such as 'come' (how) and 'colore' (colour) are the same as in modern standard Italian, whereas, in Cennino's book, 'come' is sometimes written 'come' and sometimes 'chome'; 'colore' is sometimes 'colore' and at others 'cholore'.

4 Anthony Blunt, in his Artistic Theory in Italy 1450 - 1600 (1978), p100, says of this passage in Vasari that " ... the result is not at all clear, ...". In relation to my neoplatonist reading of this paragraph, see also Liana De Girolami Cheney's essay Giorgio Vasari's Fine Arts from the Vite of 1550: The Splendor of Creativity and Design (Journal of Literature and Art Studies,  Feb. 2017, Vol. 7, No. 2.), found at academia.edu

5 In the Lives, Vita di Cimabue, pittore Fiorentino (The Life of Cimabue, Florentine painter): "cioè non nella buona maniera greca antica, ma in quella goffa moderna di que' tempi":"that is, not in the good ancient Greek way (or, manner), but in that clumsy (inept) modern one of those times" (i.e. the time of Cimabue and earlier). Vasari, throughout the Proemio of the Lives and in other places, praises ancient Greek art, however here as elsewhere, he shows his disdain for what is called Byzantine art, the style ubiquitous in Italy prior to the developments to which he is referring.

6 In the Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia in Florence, Andrea dal Castagno (1419?-1457) painted his important Last Supper; in the same small now-museum are several other frescos by him, detached from their under-drawings (their sinopia): the difference between a painting and a drawing is clear. In relation to this, when discussing Painting itself, Vasari says that it (a painting) is basically a plane with fields of colours inside lines, which by virtue of a good drawing of curving lines ("linee girate") enclose the figure (i.e. the object portrayed). Having said that, there is obvious overlapping, particularly of drawing into finished paintings where the dependence of the image on 'outline', created by drawing, is patent and ubiquitous, and especially so in painting of these periods (late Medieval, early Renaissance, Renaissance, High Renaissance, Mannerism). In some parts of Italy, this dependence was even more pronounced than in Florence itself, for instance in the works of Mantegna, Crivelli, etc.; the 'opposing' more painterly (per se) approach may be seen in Venetians such as Titian, Tintoretto, and so on.

7 Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), Florentine humanist, painter, sculptor, architect and art theorist. His books on - amongst various other subjects - painting (Della Pittura, 1435) and architecture (De re aedificatoria, 1452) are extremely important and with Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte, Vasari's Lives and Leonardo's Libro di pittura*, form a quintette of invaluable theoretical works for those interested in Renaissance artistic thought , culture, etc.
* Known through an abbreviated version as Trattato della Pittura, drawn from Francesco Melzi's Codice Urbinate (see Note 2), previously circulated in manuscript form but first printed in France in 1651.

8 It would seem that, in practice, the aim and yardstick were not really the Platonic Forms but rather the known and newly-discovered Greek and Roman sculpture to be seen scattered all over Italy but especially in Rome itself; for which reason many Renaissance artists - Brunelleschi, Alberti, Vasari and Michelangelo among many others - made the 'pilgrimage' there to see and learn for themselves. Contemporary neoplatonism (itself the result of a renewal of interest in Classical thought and writers) was a philosophical overlay, perhaps more literary/philosophical than practical, to a revived interest in and appreciation of those Greek and Roman artistic models, an interest which had in fact begun before the Renaissance proper actually got going (in art, Nicola, Giovanni and Andrea Pisano [sculpture] and Giotto [painting] for instance). Apparently neoplatonism received a significant boost during the great councils in Ferrara and later in Florence between 1438 and 1445, councils aimed at re-uniting the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Catholic churches: a certain Plethon, a member of the Orthodox delegation, who had blended a number of streams of classical Greek philosophy, as a  secular scholar and philosopher had a profound influence on Cosimo de' Medici and his circle of intellectuals.

9 The omission of the word "italiani" (Italian[s]) is probably due to the fact that the second edition was much enlarged ("ampliate" as Vasari says) by 1568 and included some brief biographies of foreign artists, i.e. non-Italian artists from northern Europe. Surprisingly, Vasari uses liberally the term 'Italian', or 'Italians', at a time when Italy as a political entity did not exist, had not existed since the fall of the Roman empire, and would not in fact exist again until 1861. It appears that his criterion for the use of such terms was linguistic (i.e. language), even though, at the time, there  were numerous Italian dialects, often incomprehensible to people from other regions of the peninsular. Educated people in western Europe generally spoke Latin as well as their native dialects, nearly all official business was conducted and written in Latin and so, for the upper levels of society, Latin was a common language, enabling them to ignore local languages and dialects. Vasari wrote the Lives in the Tuscan language  (" ... descritte in lingua toscana ...") not in Latin; this was at the time an important decision, a vexed one as well, as most serious writing was published at least in Latin. It took some hundreds of years before Italian became 'standardized' (a fact which may explain in part his variable spelling), just as it did for English. His deliberate mention that he had written in the Tuscan tongue may be related to a perceived bias throughout the Lives - particularly in the 1550 edition - in favour of the Tuscan contribution to the development (or better, 'evolution') of the arts in Italy; in the dedication to the first edition (1550) of the Lives, Vasari explicitly lays the credit for the "resurrection" of art at the feet of Tuscan artists: "E, perciò che questi tali sono stati quasi tutti toscani ... " ("And, since almost all of these were Tuscans ...").

10 Angela Cerasuolo, Diligenza e Prestezza - La tecnica nella pittura e nella letteratura artistica del Cinquecento, published in Italy in 2014 by Edifir (Edizioni Firenze): p 43, "L'affermazione del diritto delle arti figurativi a risiedere fra le arti liberali che si realizza nel XVI secolo comporta conseguenze decisive sulla pratica dell'arte. L'esaltazione del disegno come momento puramente astratto e mentale della creazione, funzionale ad affermare la natura intellettuale, comportava per contro il discredito di ogni aspetto manuale del fare artistico, in sintonia con una società che negava dignità al lavoro umano." (The affirmation of the right of the figurative arts to reside among the liberal arts which came about in the 16th century brought decisive consequences for the practice of art. The exaltation of drawing as a purely abstract and mental moment of creation, aimed at affirming its intellectual nature, implied as an opposite, the discredit of any manual aspect of artistic activity, in sympathy with a society which denied dignity to human [manual] work").