Word: vasari
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...Here is eternal fame!" exclaimed 16th century Artist and Chronicler Giorgio Vasari of Simone Martini, the Sienese painter who lived 200 years before Vasari's time. What provoked Vasari's admiration and envy in this case was not Martini's painting, which Vasari noted was "rapidly perishing," but the fact that Petrarch had mentioned Martini in two sonnets. Last week history reversed Vasari's order of precedence. Few but antiquarians care whether Martini was mentioned by Petrarch or not, but the discovery of a hitherto unknown Martini Madonna and Child (see cut] is the talk...
...narrow, Tuscan-Gothic windows. At right angles stands the triple-arched Loggia dei Lanzi (named for the German lancers quartered there by the Medici), which many critics consider the most beautiful secular building in Florence. Between the two is the short, narrow street which Mannerist Painter Giorgio di Vasari created as a tour de force in perspective, leading to the Arno...
...chronicle of the San Domenico convent at Fiesole are the simple facts about Fra Angelico: in 1407 "Fr. Joannes Petri de Mugello iuxta Vichium, optimus pictor, qui multas tabulas et parietes in diversis locis pinxit, accepit habitum clericorum in hoc conventu . . . et in sequenti anno fecit professionem."* To this, Vasari adds only that Fra Giovanni's name was Guido, that he was born in 1387, and entered the Dominican monastery "chiefly for the sake of his soul and for his peace of mind...
...Stories Vasari collected long afterward show Fra Angelico still the self-effacing monk. When Fra Angelico's old convent at Fiesole elected him to the three-year term as prior, he gladly accepted, but more honor he avoided. When Pope Nicholas V offered to make him Archbishop of Florence, Fra Angelico. who believed that there was "less trouble and error in obeying others," declined. He urged instead a fellow Dominican, who was later canonized as St. Antoninus...
Almost 100 years later, the painter Vasari rendered a judgment on Fra Angelico's works that most succeeding generations have echoed and are likely to repeat: "It is an unspeakable delight to regard them, for it appears that the spirits of the blessed in heaven cannot be otherwise than these . . . The entire coloring appears to be the work of a saint or an angel like themselves. Right well did this holy friar deserve the name by which he was always known, Fra Giovanni Angelico...