Michelangelo's friend and Renaissance art theorist Giorgio Vasari compiled the first sketch album based on historical logic, the Libro de ' disegni (picture book), which was widely mentioned in the second edition of The Famous Biography of the Artist (originally titled The Life of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects), published in 1568, and became a means of identifying the artist's style.
On 29 June 1574, two days after Vasari's death, the catalogue of drawings was given to The Archduke Francisco I of Tuscany and is believed to contain some 526 paintings. After that, the album mysteriously disappeared.
Recently, "George Vasari, The Legend of the Sketch Album" was held at the Louvre Museum in France, and the exhibition began with the following words: "Then the Sketch Album disappeared..."
Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, The Childhood Study of St. John the Baptist
It is reported that the exhibition is jointly organized by the Louvre and the Swedish National Museum, and 162 of the current "Sketch Atlas" are now in the Louvre and 83 in the Swedish National Museum. There are also some works from the "Sketch Album" in the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, the British Museum, and the Albertina Gallery in Vienna.
Why is the Sketch Atlas scattered everywhere? In fact, after Vasari's death, the "Sketch Album" mysteriously disappeared, which was also the beginning of the Louvre exhibition. "Then the Atlas of Drawings disappeared..." the first of the inscriptions on the wall read, "it did not appear in the Florentine storehouse, and was not even once talked about again." By the 1630s, however, some of these works were revived in England.
The great collectors and connoisseurs of the 17th and 18th centuries dreamed of witnessing and owning the works of this "art bible." The most famous of these was Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), who argued that Vasari's sketch catalogue inspired a tradition in which each piece was accompanied by some type of decoration. To show that it once belonged to Vasari's legendary collection.
Marco del Moreau, Diana and Endimion
Vasari's sketch atlases have attracted the attention of scholars for centuries, but this is a Sisyphean task, because Vasari's sketch atlases do not have a specific catalogue list, so much of the research has focused on the appreciation, attribution, reconstruction, and other fields of museum collections.
In 1950 two scholars, Arthur Popham and Philip Pouncey, noticed the mysterious signs on the drawings, and the Louvre exhibition focused on the aftermath of this discovery more than half a century earlier.
Exhibition site
Vasari and sketch albums
Vasari was born into an ordinary family in Arezzo, Tuscany, and was recommended in his early years by his cousin Luca Sinoleli to learn art under the glass painter Guglielmo Da Massilia. At the age of 16 he came to Florence to join the circle of Andrea del Salto and his students Rosso Fiorentino and Pontomo, where he received a humanistic education. He became friends with Michelangelo and was influenced by his painting style. In 1529 he visited Rome to study the works of Raphael and other Artists of Rome during the heyday of the Renaissance. He served the Medici family for life.
Vasari
Vasari was first and foremost a painter who admired Michelangelo, but pursued Mannerism, and his artistic style was mixed, and there were many surviving works. One of the most important masterpieces is a series of frescoes on the walls and ceilings of the Studiolo of Francesco I (Palazzo Vecchio, Ville). However, his works are usually densely composed and the atmosphere is tense, which is more in line with the aesthetics of the people at that time.
In addition to his status as a painter, he was a successful architect. The Uffizi Palace in Florence was designed by Vasari; he also designed the passage connecting the Uffizi Palace with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the Arno River, which is now known as the "Vasari Corridor".
Vasari works
But his most influential work is at the level of art history. The Celebrity Biography of Yiyuan is considered a pioneer in the publication of works of art history. The first formal use of the word "Renaissance" in the book, and the proposal to divide the stages of the development of fine arts according to the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, had a great influence on the later study of art theory.
The Celebrity Biography of the Art Garden tells the life of a painter, sculptor and architect from the 13th century to the time in which he lived, and the people who wrote about him were all deceased except for his friend Michelangelo. Vasari relied on bits and pieces of information, what he saw and heard, and interviewed others to sort out clues, and completed this huge production. Although some of the content has proved to be less accurate in later studies, in the era without photos and telephones, it conveyed an astonishing amount of information.
Giulio Clovio, The Dead Christ Raised by St. John
As for the "Sketch Atlas", some art historians believe that they were collected as a visual index of the artist's work in Vasari's "Celebrity Biography of the Art Garden", while others believe that it is a separate album in itself. In the preface, Vasari describes why he wrote:
When I took on the task of writing about the lives of great artists... I did a screening and analyzed the difference between "good", "better" and "perfect". I carefully listed the techniques, styles, and characteristics of the painter and sculptor. I also try to reveal the origins and origins of different styles, as well as the rising or falling curves of different eras and different artists.
There is no text to explain why Vasari collected and compiled the atlas of drawings, perhaps to illustrate the different styles of the artists listed, the earliest of which was painted by Cimabue (Cimabue, 1240-1302) and the most recent from Vasari's contemporaries. In the 1550 and 1568 editions of The Famous Biography of the Artist, Vasari insisted on drawing as a basis for the audience to perceive the prosperity of the painting. He also refers to the works of artists he possesses, for example, in the botticelli section, Vasari writes: "Botticelli's paintings have a unique excellence; after his death, more and more people are keen to collect his works, and my collection of Botticelli is also carefully compared and judged." ”
Vasari was also one of the founders of the Academy of Arts founded by Cosimo I in Florence in 1563. They hoped to use the academy to elevate the status of the artist, and his collection of paintings also became the teaching text of the art academy.
Felice Pinariccio, The Wedding of St. Catherine
The mystery of the Sketch Book
Vasari was also one of the first collectors to collect drawings, and he believed that drawings were an art form worth preserving and exhibiting. The Atlas of Drawings began with drawings from the collection of the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Giberti (1378-1455) obtained by Vasari. Vasari enriched and expanded the collection by using multiple volumes of blank books to paste sketches by artists including Cimabue and Michelangelo onto the pages. He would sketch himself at the edges of these authentic works. His sketches are inspired by these authentic works as a tribute to their style.
But after Vasari's death, the Atlas of Drawings disappeared until the 1630s, when some of its works reappeared in England. What happened in the half century of disappearance?
So far, both museums and collectors' research has reached an impasse. It has also been suggested that Vasari's Atlas of Drawings was originally collected by the Florentine collector Nicolò Gaddi (1537-1591), and then sold on May 18, 1638 by the descendants of the Gardi family, and after several clutches, it is now scattered in museums throughout Europe and the United States.
Domenico Killandajo, Portrait of an Old Man on a Pink Background, is thought to be from Vasari's "Sketch Atlas".
In this exhibition, 162 and 83 works from the Collection of the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum were reopened. The Collection of the Louvre is mainly the collection of the banker Jabach acquired by Louis XIV in 1671, the auction in 1755 and the collection confiscated from Saint-Morys after the French Revolution in 1793. The collection of the Rijksmuseum comes from the collection of Pierre Crozat and Carl Gustaf Tessin.
The exhibition suggests that some of these works may have come from Nicolò Gaddi (1537-1591)'s imitation of Vasari's sketch album. This speculation comes from the discovery in 1950 by Britons Arthur Poppham and Philip Pensi on drawings preserved at the British Museum. The image of a phoenix perched on a burning branch is considered very close to the family crest of the Gaddi family.
Typical nicolor Gardi collection.
In the exhibition, if you look closely, the so-called Vasari "sketch album" has two arrangements. Some pages are gorgeously arranged, while others are simple. Some scholars have judged that some of the hand-drawn borders are from vasari or his assistants, which can correspond to the descriptions in the Celebrity Biography of the Art Garden; and some are from Gadi. But Gardi's partial collection of sketches is not inferior, including Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Sarto and Domenico Beccafumi.
Typical nicolor Gardi collection.
In this exhibition, Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), Portrait of an Old Man with a Pink Background, Liberale da Verona (1445-1527/9) Studies of Nursing Women, Raffaellino del Garbo (1479-1527), the Resurrection of Christ, etc., The study of paintings in books is in front of the eyes, and the audience can also think about the relevance of Vasari and Gadi's collections, but the academic research on sketchbooks continues.
Exhibit works
Note: The exhibition will be on display until 22 July, and will be relocated to the Swedish National Museum in 2023. This article is partially compiled from the Louvre website.