#Little alchemy all elements plus

#Little alchemy all elements plus

The parts that make up the basic formula for an artist biography have stayed the same as well: human interest plus elements of creative genius that can be analyzed but never fully explained.

Artist biographies still sell well because people think the art is interesting and assume the artist must be too. Accuracy is still important but relative. Nearly 500 years later, writers still talk their way into plum gigs by going to the right parties. It’s odd to imagine a book on Renaissance art that devotes more space to Ghiberti than to Leonardo, but the broad strokes of the story haven’t aged at all. There’s plenty of juicy artist gossip in the Lives too (Leonardo and Michelangelo hated each other, Piero di Cosimo ate nothing but hard-boiled eggs), which throws the miracle of the artists’ work into starker relief. The adolescent Giotto’s talent is “miraculous,” a product of “God’s grace,” and a version of divine creation in its own right: God creates life, and little Giotto paints such a lifelike fly that his master tries to swat it away. Vasari’s artists are preternaturally good at what they do almost from the moment they emerge from the womb, much like the Christian saints whose hagiographies served as models for Vasari’s biographies. Other inaccuracies are more like myths than mistakes. He says Andrea del Castagno murdered a rival painter (he didn’t). He says engraving was invented in Florence (it wasn’t). Surveying hundreds of Italian artists, Vasari gets almost as many dates wrong as right. He may have fibbed about studying with Michelangelo, and it shows: each life in the Lives gets a short stack of pages-75 for Michelangelo in the Oxford Classics edition, 15 for Leonardo, 17 for Ghiberti-but it’s a rare page that’s totally error-free. Vasari got the job because of his superior grasp of the facts, but today nobody really thinks of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) as factual.