VASARI Giorgio Le Vite de’ piu Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architetti.

Schlosser, 289; Davide Ruggerini, article Manolessi in DBI, 69 2007. Edward L. Goldberg. After Vasari: History, Art, and Patronage in late Medici Florence. Princeton, 1988; Cicognara, 2391 ; PMM 88 (1568 edition); W.M. Ivins, « Vasari’s Lives » in New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 25 (1930), 15-20; Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari : Art and History (1995).

Magnificent copy bound for Vittoria della Rovere, wife of the dedicatee, Ferdinando de’ Medici, the granduca di toscana, of the first critical edition of Vasari’s Lives, in a superb richly decorated binding with her painted arms.

The very important augmented and illustrated edition of this landmark of art historical criticism and biography with the copious notes by Carlo Manolessi.

The first edition of what is regarded as the first art history book, The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, or more accurately, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri was published in 1550 in Florence. An understanding of Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, Paul Barolsky argues, ‘yields insight into the aesthetics of Italian Renaissance paintings: Vasari’s vocabulary, rightly understood, teaches us how to look at Italian painting.’

The book is famous for being an early source of information about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Vasari writes a description of the portrait’s features and provenance in detail, a description which is still intensely discussed by art historians. A short extract from the page illustrated above reads: ‘La bocca, con quella sua sfenditura, con le sue fini unite dal rosso della bocca, con l’incarnatione del viso, che non colori, ma carne pareva veramente’ (The mouth, with its cleft, with its ends united by the red of the lips to the embodiment of the face, are not colours but real flesh).

Barolsky writes ‘by cataloguing the beauty of her face, detail by detail… he appropriately uses the language of the Tuscan poets to bring out her divine grace and loveliness…Vasari’s great description…contributes to her enduring fame as a great figure.’ Under Manolessi’s careful editorship, this Bologna edition of the Vite signaled the shift of Vasari’s work from a hagiography of secular saints into the nascent world of 17th century antiquarianism, connoisseurship and artistic pilgrimages to view the works of the Masters.

This edition reprints the text and woodcut portraits of the first illustrated edition, published by Giunta in 1568, but adds some half dozen portraits in the Giunta style and several hundred marginal comments not present in the 1568 edition. The detailed indices show the work’s transformation into a reference tool and potential guidebook by listing : 1- portraits ; 2- portraits in the collection of Cosimo de Medici ; 3- curiosities in the sala of the Pitti Palace ; 4- an extended geographical atlas of the principal towns of Italy, listing structures where important paintings are to be seen in shorthand annotations of “highlights” ; 5- a biographical dictionary of artists, indicating cross references to important passages of the Vite other than their own etc… Le Vite “became a model for subsequent writings on the history of art… For its period it has remained the chief authority” PMM. The liminary text entitled “Sopra l’ara dell Eternita” is signed by the 17th century Vasari, Giovanni Pietro Bellori.

The beautiful engraved frontispice by Cornelis Bloemaert was realised after a famous drawing by Giovanni Angelo Canini (1617-1666) described in N. Turner, « Drawings by Giovanni Angelo Canini », Master Drawings, 1978, XVI, p. 392, fig. 7.

Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1622-1694) was the wife of Ferdinando II de’Medici. She was the daughter of Federigo-Ubaldo della Rovere (1604–1648) and Claudia de’ Medici. She is best known as the last heir of the art collection assembled by her family in Urbino and as the person who, through marriage, passed them on to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Always interested in worldly and cultural affairs, she spoke Spanish and French, knew Latin and sponsored a variety of literati, becoming patroness in 1654 of a literary academy in Siena called Le Assicurate, devoted exclusively to women. As a patron she commissioned various decorations: for example, Baldassare Franceschini worked on a series of commissions for her, including painting the ceiling of the Sala delle Allegorie in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Between 1681 and 1683 she commissioned the decoration of certain rooms in the villa at Poggio Imperiale near Florence, including the ground-floor salone, which was frescoed by the Roman artist Francesco Coralli. Vittoria was also protectress of the Conservatorio della Quiete, near Florence, and sponsored the building of the church, begun in 1686 under Pierfrancesco Silvani. Many portraits of her have survived. Among the most famous likenesses are those by Francesco Furini, Carlo Dolci and Giusto Suttermans, who portrayed her several times from childhood onwards. There are also portrait sculptures by Giovanni Battista Foggini and one in pietre dure created posthumously by Giuseppe Antonio Torricelli, who also portrayed the Grand Duchess, in her later years, on a cameo.

Provenance : Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1622-1694) ; Tommaso Caravelli : Francesco Ignazio Merlini Calderini (autograph signature on every volume) ; Acquired in 1938 from Rappaport in Rome by M. Burrus.