Complementary narratives
Understanding the book as an instrument of dissemination is one of the most important phenomena of humanist culture. The treatise became an efficient vehicle for the transmission of ideas and a repertoire that, combined with the use of engravings, allowed many painters to renew a language anchored in repetitive practices and dynamics.
The recovery of Horace’s old precept Ut pictura poesis (As is poetry so is painting) helped to construct a way of thinking and a wish to equate painting with poetry, to defend the liberal status of a profession that was seen as no more than a manual practice. At the same time, the reflection on poetry honoured the painter’s creative ability to depict a beautified and perfected natural reality, or imagined even, just as poets did.
The lives of artists published by the Tuscan painter and treatise writer Giorgio Vasari in 1550 are a first attempt to write the story of Italian art. For him, Michelangelo represented the culmination of the humanist ideal: he had gone beyond the ancient and the natural model, and he shaped a new aesthetic ideal, a guide and mirror for the new generations. Vasari used the term maniera as a criterion of historical assessment and artistic improvement, in a process going from the late Middle Ages to Michelangelo’s late period. The different stages, or manieras, had stylistic significance and championed the creativity and talent of the Italian artists who, with their efforts, had contributed to the social recognition of art as a profession. The contribution of Fra Angelico, a representative of one of Vasari’s “ages”, to the consolidation and spread of the Renaissance movement was decisive.
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Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, & architettori, 1550 |
Giovanni da Fiesole (Fra Angelico), Virgin of Humility, 1433-1435 |
