Word: vasari
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Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549) has been called both a great artist and a hack imitator. Pope Leo X made him a Cavalier of the Order of Christ; Art Historian Vasari, also a contemporary, described him simply as "a beast." He was also known as "The Sodomite," which pleased him; Bazzi signed his letters "Il Sodoma"-the name he is known by today...
...centuries Donatella's San Ludovico statue was regarded as one of his poorer works. According to the gossipy Renaissance critic, Vasari, somebody once asked the 15th Century sculptor why he had made the saint look so stupid and clumsy, to which Donatello replied that it was all on purpose-he thought Ludovico must have been a sorry fellow to pass up the kingdom of Naples to become a monk...
Fabiani certainly enjoys the mayoralty, now that the people have given it to him. To approach the office of this proletarian dignitary, you pass through a courtyard with Verrocchio's famous bronze put to, then up the stairs to the great hall with its Vasari frescoes and a Michelangelo statue, thence into an anteroom which used to be Pope Leo's chamber. Nothing so vulgar as a "no smoking" sign could be tolerated here; carefully chiseled stone tablets proclaim: "ll Sind-aco proibisce di fumare in questa sola" (The Mayor forbids smoking in this hall...
...matters worse, Da Vinci, the eternal experimenter, invented special tempera pigments for the fresco, and they proved to be less durable than those then commonly in use. Even in Da Vinci's own lifetime the Last Supper had begun to fade, and as early as 1556 Art Historian Vasari complained that it had become "a muddle of blots...
...page Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters and Sculptors of Italy made Vasari the world's first art historian. But for him, many an early Renaissance master would be unknown today, many a masterpiece unattributed. Last week, a 300-page abridgement of Vasari's Lives (edited by Betty Burroughs; Simon & Schuster; $3.75) let laymen in on some brisk reading that had previously been buried in a mass of scholarly detail. The new Lives were almost as easy going as a gossip column, and for much the same reason. Sample...