Word: vasari
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...than Fra Angelico. So completely did the man and artist live within his monastic cowl and robe, effacing himself within the disciplines of monastic life, that his early life, training and personality are only guesswork. He left no written record of his own. His biographer, Painter-Historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote nearly a century after Fra Angelico's death...
...Vasari's principal sources were a pious Dominican eulogy and the memories of an ancient monk, Fra Eustachio. with whom Vasari often gossiped at Florence's convent of San Marco. From such accounts, Vasari drew the picture of Fra Angelico as a painter who "never took up his brush without first making a prayer. He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks . . ." Some later historians have doubted this picture of Fra Angelico in a state of religious ecstasy. The evidence in his painting points far more...
...rabbit in the picture accords with Piero's deep feeling for nature. Like Rousseau, he dreamed of a golden age when noble savages lived in harmony with the wilderness. The sophisticated Florentines of Piero's day found him increasingly strange. Giorgio Vasari coolly records that after Piero's death in 1521, "it appeared that he had lived the life of a brute rather than a man, as he had kept himself shut up and would not permit anyone to see him work. He would not allow his rooms to be swept, he ate when he felt hungry...
Subtlety & Superiority. One critic who saw nothing strange about the Mono, Lisa was the 16th century's Giorgio Vasari, who praised the painting for its naturalism. "In this head," Vasari wrote, "every peculiarity that could be depicted by the utmost subtlety of the pencil has been faithfully reproduced . . . Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping someone constantly near her, to ... amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful...
...wrote songs in praise of homosexuality and accompanied them on the lute with what Vasari grudgingly described as "no little facility." He kept a string of race horses, and pets by the dozen: jays, apes, badgers, squirrels, marmosets, turtle doves, and a raven which he taught to answer the door. In an inventory of goods filed with the Siena tax collector in 1512, Il Sodoma also listed "a donkey that talks theology to the priests...