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  • 5/9/2025
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00:00Although he died more than 400 years ago, Giorgio Vasari's impact on art is still unmatched.
00:17His great book, The Lives of the Artists, is the Bible of Art History, a monumental
00:23encyclopedia of hundreds of painters, sculptors and architects spanning more than 300 years.
00:33Vasari told the story of Italian art in three parts as an epic journey from darkness into light.
00:43And at its culmination was Michelangelo, art's messiah.
00:53With The Lives, Vasari created art history, the modern notion of the artist and even the
01:04very idea of the Renaissance. In the final part of his great work, Giorgio Vasari brings his story
01:11of art to its crescendo. He writes about the Renaissance greats, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci,
01:17the divine Michelangelo. But he also brings the story into his own lifetime. These people were
01:23his contemporaries. So suddenly the master storyteller has got scores to settle, friends to reward,
01:30enemies to punish. And at last, the shadowy figure of Giorgio Vasari himself,
01:36the man at the centre of this web of fabrications, comes fully into focus.
01:50Giorgio Vasari, the man at the center of this web of art history.
01:56Giorgio Vasari argued that Renaissance art had developed out of the barbarism of the Dark Ages.
02:05He believed that artists of his own period, the 16th century, had surpassed the achievements of
02:11ancient Greece and Rome. And he celebrated, above all, the achievements of three titans.
02:17Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. But he didn't just trumpet the glory of his golden age,
02:28he judged it too. I have striven not only to say what these craftsmen have done, Vasari writes in the
02:35lives, but also to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better.
02:50Anatomist, musician, botanist, engineer, architect, and of course painter, Leonardo da Vinci was the
02:58archetypal renaissance man, and Vasari's first great hero of the golden age.
03:14So, for Giorgio Vasari, the final culminating phase of the Renaissance begins with Leonardo,
03:30and there's no better place to look at Leonardo with Vasari than here in Santa Maria delle Grazie,
03:50where we've got the great Last Supper, the only one of Leonardo's monumental works that survives from
03:56Vasari's time. Now, what did he see when he looked at it? Vasari tells us that what Leonardo did,
04:04his great innovation in creating this picture, was to express and unfold the anxiety felt by all of the
04:14disciples, as Christ says, one of you is to betray me. And Vasari spends a lot of time talking about that
04:21sense of interior emotion that Leonardo expresses on the faces and in the hands, in the bodies.
04:29We're not in the world of theatre, we're much more in the world of cinema, the world of the close-up view
04:35of the face trembling with emotion. And even though Leonardo's work is so wrecked by time, you can still
04:43feel that sense of emotion that Vasari responded to so strongly. It's almost as if by saying this,
04:53one of you will betray me, by making that announcement, Christ has, so to speak, dropped a pebble
05:00into the communal pool of emotion. Leonardo studied wave motion, and it is almost as if the emotions ripple
05:08out from that central figure of Christ. In many ways, Vasari was very much not on home territory
05:23when discussing Leonardo, because it's hard to imagine an artist further from Vasari himself.
05:28Vasari never, ever, ever left to work unfinished. He prided himself on getting the job done.
05:35Vasari was obsessed with climbing the ladder to fame. Leonardo was the opposite of that. He was a
05:42speculative thinker. He wasted years of his life, in Vasari's terms, on meaningless hypothesis,
05:50speculation, experiment. Vasari was amazed by the way Leonardo took ages over the smallest detail.
05:58But he also recognised that this was key to Leonardo's originality.
06:02What it goes to the heart of is this idea, as Vasari says, of the artist who just, who just thinks.
06:12He thinks for several days and then the perfect brushstroke. It's conceptual art in the 16th century.
06:21Nowadays, Leonardo is one of the most famous figures in all of world history, the epitome of the obsessive
06:28genius. But it was Vasari, more than anyone else, who fixed that figure in the popular imagination.
06:35And not only that, Vasari's life of Leonardo contains perhaps the most famous of all the
06:41stories in all of the lives of the artists.
06:46Mona Lisa being very beautiful, says Vasari, Leonardo always employed persons to play or sing,
06:53and jesters who might make her remain merry. And in this work there was a smile so pleasing
07:02that it was a thing more divine than human to behold.
07:05The tale of the Mona Lisa is the classic example of the power of Vasari's storytelling,
07:18the way in which he didn't just record art history, he transformed it. In fact, you could go so far as
07:23to say that it was Giorgio Vasari who turned Leonardo's most famous portrait into the world's most celebrated
07:31painting of an enigmatic smile. Yet Vasari had also been careful to remind his readers of Leonardo's
07:40failings, his capricious nature and tendency to leave works unfinished.
07:48It was a way of just tipping the scale in Michelangelo's favour.
07:52Vasari also tells the story of an actual competition between the two artists, which took place in Florence in 1505.
08:07The city had wanted to commission two great battle paintings by Leonardo and Michelangelo.
08:14Each prepared a gigantic sketch.
08:16They only survive now in smaller copies, but it's enough to give you a vivid impression of what was once planned.
08:25The impulsive Leonardo, fascinated by turbulent motion, went for a great scene of battle.
08:40Michelangelo planned to create an elegant set of studies of the male nude.
08:45A multitude of soldiers, surprised by the enemy, while bathing in a river.
08:52In the end, neither man ever completed their work.
08:56Vasari tells us that Michelangelo's sketch was so venerated that Florence's artists cut it up into pieces
09:03and divided the fragments between them.
09:05Leonardo's unfinished painting was supposedly left in place.
09:17The frescoes should have hung here, in the room of the 500, in the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florentine government.
09:23But more than 40 years after Leonardo's death, the Medici commissioned none other
09:30than Giorgio Vasari himself, to create a new series of muscular battle paintings.
09:36Leonardo contro Michelangelo
09:38Cominciamo a parlare di Leonardo contro Michelangelo in questa sala.
09:44Possessi mi dire un po'?
09:46Più che contro era uno scontro fra due grandi, era una grande città consapevole di avere due artisti sublimi.
10:00Nasce proprio a Firenze perché se noi riusciamo ad immaginarci in questo salone, questi due affreschi monumentali che dovevano esserci, poi non è andata bene, ma dovevano esserci.
10:12Questi due affreschi monumentali di Michelangelo con la battaglia di Cascina, di Leonardo con la battaglia di Anghiati, con le dimensioni che avevano, 15-16 metri, non ricordo di preciso.
10:22Ma è possibile che dentro questi affreschi, è possibile che rimane un po' di Leonardo?
10:33Io ho sempre pensato e credo che gli esperimenti tentati siano esperimenti con macchine oppure con sistemi, come si può dire, endoscopici, cioè con delle telecamere che entrano, indagano, vedono per quello che si può vedere.
10:48Perché se anche si trovasse un solo dito di una mano, sarebbe comunque un ritrovamento importante perché sarebbe l'attestato di un fatto realmente accaduto.
11:03E che facciamo? Se c'è qualcosa veramente grande dentro, che possiamo fare?
11:09Credo niente, credo niente. Non è ammissibile distruggere i affreschi di Vasari.
11:15Vasari era un artista molto diverso da Leonardo o Michelangelo, più subservienti per i Medici patronsi, ma innovativi in suo modo.
11:29He could almost be described as a kind of Andy Warhol of his time, because he was a pioneer of studio mass production, implying a factory of apprentices to help him carry out his major commissions.
11:44The results were admittedly uneven, but if he had painted everything by hand, Vasari could never have achieved all that he did in his lifetime.
11:55He was a compulsive overachiever at the same time as covering Cosimo I's Sala del Cinquecento with images of Medici might, fascistic images of triumph, of thumping military victory.
12:14He was revising his monumental lives of the artists, he just designed the Uffizi Gallery, he was constructing a corridor to connect the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, the Medici's new residence.
12:30Here was a man manically overachieving. It's as if Vasari had an absolute horror of inactivity.
12:36The second of Vasari's golden age geniuses was Raffaello Sanzio, or Raffaele.
12:53Whereas Leonardo was older than the great Michelangelo, Raffaele was eight years his junior.
12:59He died tragically young in 1537, although he left behind him a formidable body of work.
13:10He was regarded as such a prodigy that by the age of just 23 he'd been called to Rome to work as one of the principal painters to Pope Julius II.
13:20It was for Julius that he created many of his greatest masterpieces, including the monumental School of Athens.
13:31A depiction of the progress of human knowledge, which he imagines being passed from person to person, from Plato and Aristotle on to the present day.
13:40To one side of the scene, Raffaele included his own self-portrait, looking out at us with a self-possessed expression on his young face.
13:53He even took time to have a sly dig at his rival Michelangelo, painting him as a rather miserable-looking hermit.
14:01The two artists clashed frequently and were deeply suspicious of each other, so it's not surprising that Vasari, Michelangelo's great disciple, should have subtly criticised Raffaele, emphasising his worldliness, even his decadence.
14:20Especially when describing his work for one of Rome's leading money men.
14:23This is our Renaissance lifestyles of the rich and famous moment because this is the Villa Farnesina, once the palace of Agostino Chigi, the richest man in all of Renaissance Rome.
14:40He was the Pope's banker and what he represents is a particular moment when a rather decadent elite begins to discover in art and in the mythology of the classical world,
14:51all kinds of rather interestingly erotic possibilities.
14:57He's had no less an artist than Raffaele paint for him this wonderful picture of the sexy sea-nymph, Galatea, running away.
15:07Half running away, half turning to greet perhaps her pursuer.
15:11I think what Raffaele's really painted for his patron in this image of nudity with the wonderful three cupids above firing their darts of love.
15:21At the nymph is a tremendously assured piece of mythological soft pawn.
15:28But if you thought that was risque, it's really only the aperitif for a veritable banquet of erotica.
15:38And here it is, the lodger of Cupid and Psyche, a wonderful panorama of the sexual goings on, the ins and outs of the gods of the classical past.
15:52Up there we've got the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, up there we've got the Council of Gods, and all around we've got naked gods and goddesses disporting themselves.
16:01And Vasari tells us that when Raffaele and his school were painting these wonderfully sexy pictures, Raffaele got so excited that he was unable to paint.
16:13And so Kiji, driven to distraction by this absentee artist who kept going off into the centre of town to visit his girlfriend, thought well the only way I can get him to finish these pictures is if I bring his girlfriend here.
16:27I bring his girlfriend here, his girlfriend being a lady called La Fornarina, the baker's daughter.
16:32And so Vasari tells us that Kiji got La Fornarina, persuaded her at great expense to actually live in the palace.
16:39She made love to Raffaele every morning and every evening and he painted happily in between.
16:44Now, I know the whole story might be yet another of Vasari's artful fabrications, but I do think it takes you straight to the centre of this wonderfully, phallically propelled series of paintings.
16:56There's sex everywhere up here and I might be imagining it, but even the fruit and veg seems curiously overexcited.
17:14Vasari had cunningly presented the first two titans of his golden age, the libidinous Raffaele and eccentric Leonardo, as brilliant but flawed.
17:29He was clearing the way for his book's climax, the perfect Michelangelo.
17:35But the lives is much more than a straight line journey to one man's genius.
17:49It includes all sorts of twists and turns and takes in all the corners of Italy.
18:04Take the example of the Sangallo family, father and son.
18:08They're hardly household names now.
18:11But if you follow Vasari, you'll find that they were giants of architecture and engineering.
18:20I first came to Montepulciano about 25 years ago and it was very much on Giorgio Vasari's advice because I'd read in his life of Antonio da Sangallo, the elder,
18:28that Sangallo was one of the true greats of high Renaissance architecture.
18:33And this fantastic church is certainly the perfect embodiment of that Renaissance dream of reviving the solemnity and the grandeur of ancient Roman architecture.
18:44Even today, here in Montepulciano, they call it the Tempio di San Biagio, not the church of San Biagio.
18:51And maybe it's the beauty of the setting or this wonderful honey-coloured stone, but it's still very much my favourite church in all of Italy.
18:59And if you follow the trail laid out in Vasari's life of the Sangallo clan and head 50 kilometres south-east, you'll discover an even less well-known and yet more enthralling masterpiece.
19:17I've come to this quiet spot in Orvieto in Umbria on the advice of my good friend Giorgio Vasari, who writes in his life of Antonio da Sangallo,
19:28that just above the city walls there's one of the great miracles of Renaissance architectural engineering,
19:34a marvel to rival anything created in ancient Greece and Rome.
19:38Now, I'm a bit puzzled because at first sight what I see looks rather like a Renaissance version of a public convenience.
19:45The well of San Patricio was created by Sangallo's son, also called Antonio.
19:51It was started in 1527 and took more than 13 years to complete.
19:57This visit is not advisable to anyone suffering from claustrophobia, asthma and heart pathologies.
20:03So, are you OK with that?
20:06Of course, in the Renaissance I'd be leading a donkey along, laden with two panniers of water.
20:12The great miracle of it was, and you can see here looking at the steps,
20:16that what he did was he constructed a kind of double helix stair so that a mule would come in through the entrance
20:22and it would go down and round and round and round and round and come out through a different entrance,
20:27so a constant train of animals.
20:29Vasari says that the people of Orvieto were suffering from a terrible water shortage.
20:35Water shortage, they were dying and the Pope told Antonio to go there and to make a well
20:41and that he dug this incredible structure out of the Tufa, the volcanic rock on which Orvieto rests,
20:48deep, deep, deep down to the water supply, to some source.
20:53The Renaissance architect was a man of engineering, a man of mathematics.
20:59He had many dimensions to him. He was virtually a miracle worker.
21:02The Leonardo da Vinci was not the only Renaissance man.
21:05Antonio da Sangallo, who ever since he created this has been regarded almost as a patron saint of Orvieto,
21:12he too was one of the great Renaissance men.
21:23At the bottom of the well.
21:26Gee, incredible. What an incredible thing.
21:31One of the things I love about it is you read Vasari.
21:34The reason I came here was because when you read Vasari's Life of Sangallo,
21:37he is obviously, when he came here, he felt exactly what I did,
21:41because he just, he basically says, wow, wow, wow,
21:44in his sort of slightly civilised Renaissance prose,
21:46but that's basically what he says. You must see it, it's incredible.
21:50.
22:04Vasari illuminates all kinds of artists who've become neglected over the years,
22:09including one to whom time has been cruel in a different way.
22:14Jacopo Pontormo, a Florentine painter, was one of the leading lights of his age,
22:23but a vast amount of his work has been lost or destroyed.
22:27Vasari tells us that Pontormo was absolutely terrified of death,
22:33to such an extent that he wouldn't even attend a funeral.
22:36And his two greatest surviving works give us a glimpse of his strange, melancholy genius.
22:45The first, The Visitation, lies well off the beaten track
22:50in the church of San Michele in Carminiano.
22:55There's something hypnotisingly intense about the picture,
22:59the way in which it seems to freeze this moment of charged encounter
23:05between the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth,
23:09and there's this sense of intense solidarity, solemn, tragic foreknowledge
23:17that both of them, blessed with these divine pregnancies,
23:22both of them are the bearers, the vessels of these children
23:27who will lead difficult, painful, and sadly cut short lives.
23:32There's all that in the intensity of their embrace.
23:35But I love also the way in which Pontormo's actually made their heavy pregnant bellies touch
23:41at the moment of greeting.
23:43And we know from the Gospel of St Luke that at that moment,
23:46Elizabeth feels the baby leap in her womb,
23:48and she feels as though she's full of the spirit of God.
23:52And the way in which Pontormo's painted her drapery,
23:56that acid green and that tremendous scintillating orange,
24:01it's almost as if he's created in the drapery a metaphor for that idea
24:04of the baby leaping in the womb.
24:06In fact, there's almost this sense of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist
24:09communicating through the flesh of their mothers.
24:12I also love the way in which he's depicted the gaze of the two other women in the painting,
24:17the two sisters of Mary,
24:19who seem to fix us with their eyes, to draw us in.
24:22And I think that's exactly what Pontormo does.
24:26He creates pictures that draw you in,
24:29and once you're there, they don't let you go.
24:32Pontormo's other surviving masterpiece depicts a scene from the end of Christ's life,
24:50his deposition from the cross,
24:52and transforms it into something equally intense and powerful.
24:57It was completed in the late 1520s,
25:01and can be found in the little visited church of Santa Felicità,
25:05in the heart of Florence.
25:07There's no question, I think,
25:10that this is one of the world's great paintings
25:14by one of the world's great artists.
25:16The colour's extraordinary.
25:19The intensity is extraordinary.
25:21The composition is extraordinary.
25:24It's a kind of spiritual surrealism.
25:26There is nothing like it in the art of its time.
25:31And Vasari gets to that, where he says,
25:33that Pontormo is so strange that I can't understand him.
25:37But that's exactly what Pontormo is.
25:39He is an extraordinary artist.
25:41And Vasari's life of Pontormo is also, for me,
25:44one of the most tragic,
25:46because it's absolutely full of descriptions of works that no longer exist.
25:52There's this great oeuvre of Pontormo.
25:55And really, it's just come down to the beautiful visitation and this painting.
26:01They're really the only two perfectly preserved great masterpieces to survive.
26:06So Vasari, he gives us the rest of the iceberg,
26:11and all we've got left to contemplate is the tip.
26:28Beyond forgotten greats like Pontormo,
26:30it's as if Vasari can't bear to leave any of his contemporaries out.
26:37The fact that the Lives is such an exhaustive list of high Renaissance artists is part of the book's beauty.
26:45It's an A to Z, from Albertinelli to Zucchero.
26:54I often get the sense when reading the third and final part of Vasari's Lives of the Artists,
26:59that this is a book that's almost run out of control.
27:04He'd begun with this very sort of schematic account of history and the development of ours.
27:10And every artist has to fit that. Every artist has a different rung on the ladder of progress.
27:15But when you come into this incredible period, say from about 1480 to about 1530,
27:22you have the sense that the book's exploded into a carnivalesque procession
27:27of larger-than-life, strange, eccentric characters.
27:30It becomes this extraordinary celebration and eccentricity.
27:36And I think there's a kind of point to that as well as a subtext as so often with Vasari.
27:41Because you have to remember that he's living, he's writing in the 1550s and the 1560s.
27:48This is a moment of clampdown.
27:50We've had the Reformation in Italy.
27:52We've got the Counter-Reformation.
27:54The Church is taking control of art again.
27:57The number one lesson is, thou shalt conform.
28:00And Vasari is looking back to this period, this golden period, just 20 years ago,
28:05when artists were free and they expressed themselves.
28:10There's also a strong sense of darkness about many of the later lives,
28:14such as that of the morbid Pontormo,
28:16which may have reflected the spiritual crisis of the time.
28:20And there's a greater sense of Vasari's own psychological complexity.
28:27He has, in fact, been the subject of a study by a leading Florentine psychologist.
28:35I went to see Graziella Margarini in Florence on an appropriately storm-tossed day.
28:45Good morning.
28:47Good morning, I'm here to see Graciela.
29:05Yes, I'm here.
29:06What a horrible time.
29:08It's always rain, rain.
29:12It's in London that rain.
29:14No, in this moment there's the sun in London.
29:17Oh, yes?
29:18Yes, yes, really.
29:25Good morning.
29:27Good morning.
29:28How are you?
29:29I'm very well.
29:30Do we speak Italian or do we speak English?
29:33Both.
29:34Okay, perfect.
29:35This is my friend.
29:37This is my friend Giorgio Vasari.
29:39Oh, so.
29:41I'm going to put him on the couch.
29:43I'm going to put him on the couch.
29:45Perfect.
29:46Sit down, please.
29:48Yeah.
29:49Spero di trovare un profilo psicologico del nostro amico Giorgio Vasari.
29:57Giorgio Vasari.
29:58Lei saprà che è nato prematuro, sembra, che è stato un bambino prodigio, ha cominciato
30:04subito ad essere vorace, non soltanto nell'alimentazione, ma vorace anche nel conoscere, sapere tutto,
30:12voleva disegnare, dipingere, fin da piccolissimo.
30:15Tant'è vero che a me veniva in mente un personaggio che noi oggi chiamiamo work alcolic, cioè intossicati dal lavoro, alcolista dal lavoro.
30:27Lui sembrava proprio questo.
30:29Penzi che sotto la spinta dei medici, lui si sposò, ha avuto anche dei figli, non ne ha mai parlato. Era talmente preso da questa ansia di votatrice di conoscere proprio una pulsione conoscitiva che lo divorava dentro.
30:49Chi pensa di Vasari come inventore della storia dell'arte? Il primo che pensa dal sua lingua, dal sua moda degli artisti.
31:02Quello che lui riceveva dalla visione, lo metteva dentro di sé, lo impastava con le sue cose, quindi fantasticando anche un poco.
31:15E poi lo scriveva, lo traduceva in scrittura.
31:20Ecco perché voi dite storici che le storie di questi grandi non sono esattamente la biografia reale.
31:32Vesari lavorato furiosamente, mentre guarda gli innermosti sentieri.
31:39Ma non mi ricordo se ha usato la vita per evitare questi spessi aspetti di loro personale.
31:48L'ottima esempio di questo è l'ottima di tutti i miei biografi.
31:54Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Il Sodoma, as Vasari preferred to call him, is the most fascinatingly
32:12unholy character in all of the lives. So it's something of a paradox that his finest surviving
32:19work should be found here, in the idyllic spiritual retreat of the Abbey of Monte Oliveto, tucked
32:26away in the Tuscan hills.
32:33The paintings by Sodoma in this cloister tell stories from the life of Saint Benedict. They're
32:41competent, sophisticated, impeccably pious. But I wouldn't be dwelling on them if it weren't
32:48for the amazing tales Vasari told about their creator.
32:57Sodoma included his own self-portrait in the fresco cycle. But maybe there is a bit of a
33:03twinkle in his eyes. But according to Vasari, he was a larger-than-life monster.
33:11In creating the character of Sodoma, Vasari invented the figure of the outsider artist. Who could
33:17be more outsider than Sodoma? Everything that you can do that's transgressive, he does. He's
33:23a womanizer. He's a manizer. He sleeps with his painting boys. He collects animals. He's
33:29got a fleet of racehorses. He's a gambler. He loves money more than work. He never studies.
33:35Now, the weird thing, of course, is that there's almost no evidence in the record of history to
33:41suggest that this man, here he is, Sodoma himself, was like that at all. There's some suggestion in
33:48his evident fascination with animals that perhaps Vasari was telling the truth when he made him out
33:52to be this great menagerist, this collector of animals. But the rest is a fiction. So you think,
33:58why? Why would Vasari have invented this extraordinary character who breaks all the rules?
34:04Now, the conventional wisdom is that his life of Sodoma is one of the great character assassinations
34:12in all of art history. But I think it's much more complicated than that, because Vasari makes
34:16Sodoma such an entertaining character, you end up thinking that Vasari's sort of curiously in love
34:21with him. And after all, Sodoma represents everything that Vasari isn't.
34:27And I think the forever well-behaved, hardworking, hardworking Vasari gratuitously invented his myth
34:35of Sodoma to indulge his own hidden desire to rebel. You can't be good all the time.
34:48Vasari wrote for many reasons, personal and political. One minute he's giving vent to his wildest
34:56inner fantasies. The next, he's playing the part of Italian art's judge and jury.
35:03But running through all of his book, there's another purpose,
35:08a determination to praise the artists of his own corner of Italy.
35:15Vasari's Tuscan patriotism helps to explain some of his biggest blind spots.
35:20And one artist Vasari just didn't get was the most celebrated painter of Parma in northern Italy.
35:37His name was Antonio Correggio, and he developed a new dizzying form of perspective.
35:42His greatest work is a soaring vision of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
35:48painted for the dome of the city's cathedral.
35:53This is what Correggio's whirling masterpiece usually looks like.
35:57But just at the moment, it's in restoration.
35:59This is one of those occasions when it's actually a good thing, from our point of view,
36:15that the work is being restored. Because what it means is that the guys have just,
36:20well, they've literally just put in the final touches to this scaffolding.
36:23In a week's time, the restorers are going to begin work on Correggio's great dome paintings.
36:29But what that means is that, for a little short window of time,
36:34we're able to get right up there and look in really close detail
36:39at one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art.
36:43Of course, they didn't make scaffolding as solid as this in Vasari's Dane.
36:46The lives of the artists contain some rather good stories about scaffolding, rather bloody stories.
36:51There was a painter in San Gimignano, he tells us about, who stepped backwards off his scaffolding
36:57to admire his work and simply fell 200 feet to his death.
37:10I don't believe this. Here we are.
37:13I'm going to close this so that I don't fall to my death like a Renaissance artist.
37:26Wow. Isn't that absolutely fantastic?
37:32I'm going to be probably the first person to remove cobwebs from Correggio's dome
37:37since about 1530 when he finished it. A very, very old cobweb.
37:45But what a, for all that, what a fantastically fresh, fresh and extraordinary work of art.
37:53Though some of the colours have come down, which is why they're going to give it a claim,
37:56what immediately strikes you is just how difficult it must have been for Correggio to achieve that
38:03sense of whirling aerial perspective. But getting up close to it, you just realise
38:10it's just a bit of wonky old wall that's been transformed through art into this wonderful figure
38:16of probably the most reproduced figure on the whole ceiling of this reeling angel accompanying
38:25Mary on her ascent to heaven. And the whole, the subject of the painting is a sort of whirling
38:30upwards of Mary and this sort of universal joy. And there's a kind of orgiastic power about it.
38:38The funny thing is that Vasari himself, and I think he was a bit nonplussed by finding something
38:44as incredible as Correggio here in Parma. This great masterpiece, this great artist.
38:50It's almost as if he didn't quite know what to say. And if you read his life of Correggio,
38:54it's quite funny. You almost hear him thinking to himself, the cogs of Vasari's mind are going
38:59round. What can I give him? What can I give him? I've got to give him some, some big achievement.
39:04And for some bizarre reason, he decides to make Correggio the man who could paint hair,
39:10human hair better than anyone else. Vasari says it again and again. Ah, Correggio,
39:15that Correggio, he could paint hair better than anyone else. Now, I have to say that looking at
39:19this, well, you know, there are some quite nice hairdos, and they are very well painted. It's not
39:23what I'd single out.
39:45One of the things that comes across really strongly from Vasari's lives is just how much traveling your
39:51Renaissance artist did. Vasari himself traveled constantly. You find this in his life, in his
39:59own life of himself and his life of his disciple, his pupil, Cristofano Gerardi. Not merely to earn a
40:05buck, but also to learn from other artists, to see what the great Michelangelo has done. So you get
40:11this wonderful sense of art as a kind of traveling conversation. Because all the artists are obviously,
40:18it's obvious from Vasari's account. They all go, what's he done? What's he done? Oh, I must go to
40:23Venice and see what he's done. There's this spirit of competition that radiates from the pages of this book.
40:36The spirit of competition in Venice had contributed to the city becoming, together with Florence and Rome,
40:42one of the three great artistic powerhouses of Italy.
40:51But to read Vasari's lives, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Venice was little more than a
40:56provincial backwater. The fact is, the further you travel north, away from Florence, the less likely
41:04you are to find complete approval from Vasari. He thought that the Venetians would forever be
41:13builders wielding a paintbrush. And the funniest example of Vasari's anti-Venetian feeling is the
41:22fact that when he came here, he immediately made a beeline for the one masterpiece by a Florentine
41:28artist that he could find. Andrea del Verrocchio, who was Leonardo's teacher, started work on the
41:37Colleone monument in 1468. And it took a remarkable five years to complete. The greatest equestrian statue
41:45since antiquity, it was a truly groundbreaking achievement.
41:49For Vasari, the Colleone monument was a wonderful opportunity to indulge in a bit of typical
41:57Florentine one-upmanship, because here, in the centre of one of Venice's most beautiful piazzas,
42:02he encountered a work of Tuscan art, a great masterpiece of Florentine art. He tells that when
42:10they commissioned Verrocchio to create the work, they originally asked him to do the whole thing.
42:14And at the last minute, just when he was about to cast it, they said, well, actually,
42:17we'd rather have a Venetian artist do the body and you just do the horse. In a fit of pique,
42:22he smashed his model to pieces. He cut its head off and left the city in a rage. The Venetians sent
42:27a letter to him saying, never come back here again or we'll cut your head off. He replied,
42:32well, I don't want to have my head cut off because not even you powerful Venetians can put it back on
42:36again. But I could very easily repair the head of my statue. And they liked that reply, Vasari says.
42:42So they sent for him, the Venetians cowed by the Florentine's decamaronian wit. And he completed the work
42:50as it stands. But I think when Vasari looked at it, he really just saw a football score. Florence won,
42:56Venice nil.
42:57What Vasari didn't say was that the Venetians had invented an entirely new approach to art,
43:07rooted in colour and light. Titian, the greatest master of Venice, could evoke the feel of flesh
43:16and the glow of fire. And he improvised so freely, he'd often use his fingers instead of a brush.
43:22For the purist Vasari, with his Florentine faith in clear drawing and sharp outlines,
43:30this was dangerous heresy. And his life of Titian is a subtle demolition job.
43:38In the cleverest twist of all, he managed to give the best line to Michelangelo.
43:44I think the most revealing of Vasari's Venice stories is the one where he tells
43:52of the time that he paid a visit to the studio of Titian. And Vasari was with Michelangelo.
43:59And they admired a painting by Titian, a beautiful painting of Danae being showered with gold coins.
44:05And at the end of it, Vasari did something rather sneaky. He said,
44:10Well, of course, when we were with the painter, we admired his work.
44:15But as soon as we were out of the door, I asked Michelangelo,
44:17What do you really think about Titian? And he says,
44:21Michelangelo turned to me and he said, Well, Titian's a very good painter, but
44:25such a shame he never learned to draw. Talk about damning with faint praise.
44:30For Vasari, Rome and Florence were the true centres of Italian art.
44:49And there would only ever be one Messiah.
44:53His coming was an event of biblical proportions.
44:57Vasari's life of the divine Michelangelo runs to well over a hundred pages,
45:06ten times the length of that given to Leonardo.
45:09And at its centre is an account of his greatest achievement.
45:13Michelangelo started work on the Sistine Chapel in 1508, aged 32, and it took four years to complete.
45:33This work has been and truly is a beacon of our art, Vasari wrote, sufficient to illuminate a world which,
45:43for so many hundreds of years, had remained in the state of darkness.
45:49So, where do you start, apart from saying thank you to the Sistine Chapel authorities for letting me in here on my own?
45:58Normally this place is heaving. It's like a tube train. You can't think, let alone really look at the pictures.
46:04I mean, you have such a strong sense of what an incredible achievement it was, of course, Michelangelo spent years in here on his own, up there on his scaffolding, painting like that as he wrote in a poem with my head bent on my back.
46:21And my paint falling on my face, as if my face was a kind of floor. Now, to begin at the beginning, the different levels of the ceiling, of this wonderful ceiling, imply different degrees of closeness to God.
46:35I think the whole thing is a great kind of painted mirror, and I think the whole thing is a great kind of painted mirror, and I think the whole thing is a great kind of painted mirror.
46:51And you need to know how it works. You need to know how it's put together. Now, on the bottom level, Michelangelo has represented the ancestors of Christ.
47:01These are those descended from Noah who are in a kind of benighted state of waiting. They are waiting for Christ's arrival.
47:11And he's often said to be a painter without a sense of humor, but that's absolutely not true, because here he paints them as people who are bored to death.
47:21They look like people on the tube, or people in the dentist's waiting room, fearfully waiting for that moment when they say, you're next, come in.
47:31Then above them, Michelangelo suddenly turns up the spiritual volume, because here you've got the figures of the prophets and of the Sibyls.
47:41These are the human beings through whom God communicates his message to mankind. They are both blessed and gifted and also punished, I think, by the burdens of prophetic thought.
47:56And I think Michelangelo himself felt as though he was a kind of prophet painting these extraordinary pictures, communicating God's message to those down here looking up.
48:08And I think he's painted them with an immense sense of fellow feeling. They are solemn, they're introverted, they're everything that we know from descriptions of him that he was.
48:17So there's a lot of projection going on there, I think.
48:20And then on the great central spine of the ceiling, he tells the story, the large story of Genesis.
48:29It's a story that takes you from the creation of the cosmos and these three great scenes in which God separates light and darkness, creates the sun and the moon, and then calls forth life from the waters.
48:39Then, almost immediately, or into the climactic image of this great ceiling, the image of God creating Adam.
48:48It's almost like the hinge on which the whole ceiling turns. This is the moment when God, perfect God, this floating, soaring figure that hadn't been seen before in art, creates Adam.
49:00It's Adam, this perfect nude, probably the most perfectly beautiful figure on the whole ceiling.
49:05And the two, for this one moment of perfect symmetry and perfection, they reflect each other.
49:12And you could feel that energy of creation sparked across that thin space of air that separates the two fingers.
49:19And from then on, it's really the progressive story of man's alienation from God.
49:25This is the Genesis tale, and it's a dark one, and Michelangelo tells it in a very severe way.
49:31So we move to the creation of Eve, being pulled from Adam's rib, to this terrible scene of temptation and expulsion rendered, two images in one.
49:42On one side, Eve and Adam fall.
49:46And Michelangelo's painted it with a daring, dark air of sexuality, placing Eve's face threateningly close to Adam's genitalia.
49:58There's this profound, and it went back to the Middle Ages, this profound sense that the fall is not just a fall into temptation, it's a fall into sexual temptation.
50:08And on the other side, Adam and Eve, expelled from paradise.
50:13They leave the Garden of Eden, and they enter mortal time.
50:17And you look at their faces, and they've immediately aged.
50:20Eve looks back at the self that she once was with infinite regret.
50:24And from there on, particularly if you look at the deluge, it's as if having entered the world of the fallen world of human existence, merely human existence, everything fragments and explodes.
50:39You've got the scene of the deluge, where the figures are almost scattered, like autumn leaves.
50:43And then the final image is this depiction of the drunkenness of Noah, an old man drunk, alone in his tent, discovered by his three sons.
50:56An image of fallen humanity.
50:58What a contrast to that image of God at the other end, separating light from darkness.
51:05It's a bleak and severe and ascetic telling of the tale of human history, and it's got a huge, solemn grandeur to it.
51:17Michelangelo may have used the occasional assistant to paint the occasional tiny bit of the ceiling, but basically it was all his own work.
51:28And when you stand here in this great space and you look up at that vast amount of painted ceiling with its extraordinary multiplicity of compositions and forms and faces and emotions and ideas, it's almost unbelievable that something that amazing could have been created by one human being.
51:49So no wonder Giorgio Vasari in his life of Michelangelo says that he wasn't actually a man at all.
51:56He was an angel. He was a being sent down by God to show the rest of us artists how it's done.
52:03And now it's done.
52:04And now it's done.
52:05And now it's done.
52:10And now it's done.
52:11And now it's done.
52:12And now it's done.
52:13And now it's done.
52:14And now it's done.
52:15And now it's done.
52:16And now it's done.
52:17And now it's done.
52:18And now it's done.
52:19And now it's done.
52:20And now it's done.
52:21And now it's done.
52:22And now it's done.
52:23And now it's done.
52:24And now it's done.
52:25And now it's done.
52:26And now it's done.
52:27And now it's done.
52:28And now it's done.
52:29And now it's done.
52:30And now it's done.
52:31And now it's done.
52:32And now it's done.
52:33And now it's done.
52:34And now it's done.
52:35And now it's done.
52:36And now it's done.
53:21Michelangelo died in 1564 at the great age of 88.
53:27His funeral was as grand as that given to any Renaissance prince
53:31and was organised by Giorgio Vasari himself.
53:38All the artists of Florence accompanied the coffin
53:41to the church of Santa Croce.
53:46Vasari helped to carry the coffin
53:48and designed Michelangelo's tomb.
53:55He truly believed that Michelangelo was divine,
53:59that he'd been a Christ-like figure
54:00who'd shown the true path to all other artists.
54:09In a sense, Vasari's Lives of the Artists is itself an enormous burial ground,
54:16a cemetery to all the great figures of the Renaissance.
54:18Vasari finished the book four years after Michelangelo's death
54:27and just six years before his own.
54:32As a final coder to his life and work,
54:35he designed a space sacred to his vision,
54:38a chapel for the very first European Academy of Art,
54:41dedicated to the memory of Michelangelo
54:44and the achievements of the Renaissance.
54:47It's one of the magic spaces, secret spaces, of Florence.
54:56There are so many, but this is really important for Giorgio Vasari
54:59because it contains so much of what his life's work really was about.
55:05This is the chapel of St. Luke,
55:08La Cappella di San Luca,
55:09in the church of Santissima Annunziata,
55:11and it was created by Vasari and a group of his friends
55:14because, as he said, he felt that the old guild of St. Luke,
55:19the guild of the artists, had fallen into a poor state.
55:23And what you get from this space is the sense with which
55:26Vasari invested the artists of Renaissance France
55:29with a real solidarity.
55:32And over the altar, he painted an image of St. Luke,
55:39the patron saint of artists,
55:41shown depicting the very first image of the Madonna.
55:46And Vasari, no slouch when it came to self-publicity,
55:52painted the figure of St. Luke as a portrait of himself.
55:56There he is, Giorgio Vasari, as St. Luke.
55:58But in a sense, when one thinks back on Vasari's project,
56:04the whole lives of the artists,
56:05what was it that he really gave to art?
56:08I think he gave to art the sense
56:10that this has been a great collective enterprise,
56:14that art, image-making, it's a project.
56:17And if you look down here at this plaque,
56:22I think it all comes together
56:24because what Vasari did when this academy was founded,
56:28he arranged for the bones, the remains,
56:30the relics of a whole host of Florentine artists
56:33to be brought here,
56:35and they included, by the way, the great Contourma,
56:37to be brought here and placed under this stone,
56:40embellished as it is with the images of art.
56:43The compass, the measuring tools, the pencils, the brushes.
56:49And what this conveys is really Vasari's great message,
56:53his big idea, which was that art is a collaboration.
56:58You know, that Giotto taught Mazzacchio,
57:00that Mazzacchio was then looked at and studied by Leonardo,
57:04Raphael learned from Leonardo.
57:06It's a continuum, with Vasari coming afterwards.
57:09That was his idea.
57:12And what he's saying here is that,
57:14yes, we artists are great, we're great,
57:17and we deserve to be remembered,
57:19but above all, we're all in it together.
57:22And that was the final part of Travels with Vasari.
57:43But Andrew Graham Dixon's back here on BBC HD
57:45with the second part of The Art of Russia,
57:47Wednesday at 10.
57:48Next tonight, some stunning parallels in life.

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