Works by Giorgio Vasari
53 works · 120 msGiorgio Vasari, who invented the collected biography of artists with his Lives, was also a busy painter for the Medici in Florence and Rome; below are sacred panels, allegories and crowded battle frescoes.
In Six Tuscan Poets, painted in 1543–44, Dante wears laurel over his red hood and holds up a volume of Virgil, while Petrarch beside him keeps a hand on a green book and a table in front carries globes, books and an inkwell. Vasari, from Arezzo, had learned first from the stained-glass painter Guglielmo da Marsiglia, and at sixteen joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and Rosso Fiorentino in Florence. Michelangelo befriended him and shaped his style. The Temptation of Saint Jerome was never finished: the chalk grid he used to scale up his drawing still shows through the first thin layers, behind the old hermit pressing a stone to his chest.
His frescoes below, from the 1550s to the early 1570s, show battles, Lorenzo the Magnificent receiving ambassadors, allegories of Pistoia and Pisa, and the old gods. In The battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana pikemen and horsemen fill the wall up to the hills, with the dead heaped under rearing horses in front. Some of the drawings, from about 1544–45, are in brown ink and wash on blue paper, lit with white; Youth Running is fitted into a tall curved field: a laurel-crowned young man, seen from behind, throws his arm round another youth while old men look on.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Giorgio Vasari, Louvre, J. Paul Getty Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.
