Giorgio Vasari: Art and History.

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, was first published in an edition of 1550. In the following years it was revised and expanded - with the advice of historians and litterati in Vasari's circle at the court of the granddukes of Tuscany - for publication in 1568. It is much more than a sourcebook on the lives and works of Italian (and a few northern) artists from the time of Giotto until Vasari's contemporaries. It is the foundation of modern art history and critical theory and - on the relatively rare occasions when Vasari relaxes from his rhetorical positions to engage in practical criticism (in the sense of judging the success or deficiencies of particular works) - it is more perceptive and original than any art criticism of the Renaissance.

Rubin's book is a comprehensive study of the making of the Lives and the author's career as a writer and gatherer of data, his sources in ancient rhetoric and biographical literature and in Italian critical and historical writing from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. Central to her argument is the examination of the factors that governed the development from the first to the second edition as Vasari sharpened his research methods, gained a firmer grasp on historical method under the guidance of Vincenzo Borghini and Palo Giovio, and reduced the text's mythical and folkloric aspects.

Rubin points out that a primary aim of Vasari, writing "as a painter," was to elevate the stature and status of the artist; to that end he was committed to a rhetoric of praise. He was the first to raise the chronicle (as represented by the chapters on art in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historiae and Lorenzo Ghiberti's Commentarii) to the level of historical interpretation and, equally important, he integrated connoisseurship and art theory - grounded in rhetoric - with biography.

I referred to the rarity of Vasari's practical criticism, as exemplified by his reservations about the paintings of Giulio Romano: "One could say that Giulio expressed his concepts better in drawings than in carrying out projects or in pictures, since one sees in them more vivacity, boldness, and nuance [affetto]: and this happens maybe because a drawing is made in an hour, boldly and directly, whereas pictures demand months and years. So they came to bore him, and, in the absence of that vital and burning love that one has when one begins anything, it is no wonder that he did not devote to them that total perfection that one sees in his drawings." Guilio preferred to address works of art in the tradition of what Svetlana Alpers, in a much quoted essay, called ekphrasis - his elaborate and typically uncritical "rhetoric of praise." This rhetoric involved emphasizing the effectiveness of the dramatization of the subject-matter, the formulaic mode of praise I think Vasari would have regarded as criticism. The application of the term "ekphrasis" has been challenged as philologically inappropriate, but it adequately designates a formulaic mode derived especially from descriptions of pictures in the Imagines ascribed to Philostratus the Younger. It would have been desirable for Rubin to have discussed the dissonance between Vasari's criticism-as-evaluation and his criticism-as-praise.

The core of the evolutionary tale in the Lives is found in the three Prefaces to the different "ages" of Renaissance art: the "first light" of Giotto and his followers (fourteenth century); the control of imitation of nature and the antique (fifteenth century); and the ultimate achievement of perfection by Leonardo, Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo (early sixteenth century). In the last three chapters of the book, Rubin shows how this evolutionary core is articulated in Vasari's treatment of one paradigmatic artist in each age: Giotto, Donatello, and Raphael. This close inspection makes it possible to see how Vasari's struggles to make his career as an artist and courtier, and his role as a publicist for Tuscan art, color the structure and emphases of each biography.

In a review in the New York Review of Books of 5 October 1995, Charles Hope made the extravagant proposition that the Proemii, which constitute the core of the historical and critical theory of the Vite (and in which, as Rubin says, the idea of a Renaissance was first proposed), were not written by Vasari but by a relatively obscure Florentine contemporary, Pierfrancesco Giambullari, who had a part in preparing Vasari's text for publication. There is no persuasive evidence for this hypothesis, which seems to have been motivated by Hope's undeservedly low opinion of Vasari's capacity as a writer.

Vasari's development as an historian in the period between the first and second editions of the Lives was first studied by Wolfgang Kallab, and more recently clarified in a splendid short study by Zygmunt Wazbinski published in the Acts of the Vasari congress of 1976. That contribution was based on two books on Vasari as a historian and biographer published by Wazbinski in Polish in 1972 and 1975; Rubin does not cite them, though they could be the best preceding contributions to her subject (see Vasari i jego dzieje "Sztuk rysunku" urvagi had geneza nowozytnej biografiki artystycznej, Torun, 1972; and Vasari i nowozytna historiografia sztuki: antologia, wstep, komentarze, wybor ii przekl. tekstow Zygmunt Wazbiski, Warsaw, 1975).

Rubin's book, so much of which is devoted to tracing the role of rhetoric in Vasari's literary and critical formation, has (ironically) serious rhetorical problems. Its information is delivered in rich profusion without sufficient distinction of the more from the less relevant. For example, so many possible sources are cited for Vasari's historical or biographical method that the image of his intellectual formation is muddled rather than enriched. Frequently the line of the argument is lost in the abundance of information and in the pursuit of peripheral detail. The author seems so reluctant to impose her own interpretative stamp on the material that the kernel of her argument does not emerge. Nonetheless, the book is an exceptionally rich compendium of information on Vasari's career, his sources, and his evolution as an historian and biographer.

JAMES S. ACKERMAN Sackler Museum, Harvard University