Giotto's Father and the Family of Vasari's "Lives" Book

This study examines the extensive and deep theme of family in Vasari's "Lives" and explains its importance in the study of the image of the family in the 16th century. The world of the artist's workshop was closely tied to the artist's life. Artists were often trained by their fathers, and they sometimes married into the families of other artists. It is thus reasonable for Vasari to have viewed the community of artists as an extended family or brotherhood presided over by major partriarchal figures, for example, Giotto, Ghiberti and Raphael. Building on the view of Vasari's work as a highly wrought, complex work of fiction, Barolsky shows how the "Lives" is not just a series of biographies of artists but a sustained, detailed and highly fictionalized account of artists' families. In very nearly every biography, Vasari makes up stories of paternal blessing, of filial piety or prodigality, of noble and ignoble wives, of greedy, cruel or violent relatives - tales that tell us a great deal about Vasari's own family in particular and about Renaissance family relations in general. Barolsky's explanation of just how deeply ideas about family inform Vasari's "Lives" provides a more complex understanding of one of the most important sources for the comprehension of the Renaissance artist.Read More