- 5/9/2025
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00:00On the 27th of June, 1574, Giorgio Vasari died in Florence, the city that had made him rich
00:14and famous. In life, he'd been a prolific painter and architect, but not one of the
00:21finest of his age. His enduring legacy is a book he devoted his life to completing.
00:30The Lives of the Artists. It's the most important book about art ever written, a monumental
00:39encyclopedia of sculptors, architects and painters spanning more than 300 years. The Lives
00:50tells the story of one of the greatest explosions of creativity in human history. A period that
01:01produced many of the titans of art.
01:11Vasari, it was a time of miracles that he named the Renaissance.
01:18Vasari's Lives of the Artists was the first really great book about art ever written, and
01:41it's still the essential guide to the Italian Renaissance. Now I'll be following in Vasari's
01:45footsteps and trying to make sense of his monumental history, but this is no straight line journey,
01:52because Vasari's story is full of bawdy humour, tall tales, outright lies, even murder. But
02:00above all, it's full of some of the very greatest art ever created.
02:07My search for Vasari begins in the heart of Renaissance Italy, Florence. And the archive of the Academia
02:12del Disegno, founded by Giorgio Vasari himself, is one of the city's hidden spaces.
02:14A true labirint.
02:16A real labirinto.
02:21It is a labirinto.
02:23in the heart of Renaissance Italy, Florence.
02:26And the archive of the Accademia del Disegno,
02:29founded by Giorgio Vasari himself,
02:32is one of the city's hidden spaces.
02:38It's a real labyrinth.
02:40Yes.
02:42She is Ariadne.
02:44It's a thread.
02:45It's a thread.
02:49Vasari has conquered.
02:52Eh?
02:52Vasari.
02:53Va conquistato.
03:00And here are preserved
03:03the oldest vites of Vasari.
03:06I give them in his hands.
03:09OK, I'll be very careful.
03:11First edition of Vasari's Lives.
03:14The lives of the most excellent architects,
03:16painters and sculptors, Italian.
03:19It's really the first book that got me going.
03:22On my career, looking at and thinking about art.
03:26In a sense, I hold Vasari to account for the fact
03:29that I've spent much of my life following in his footsteps.
03:32But increasingly over the years,
03:33I've become fascinated by Vasari's own story.
03:37Who was he?
03:38What were his motives?
03:40How did he come to write this book?
03:42In which, basically, he formulated, for the very first time,
03:45the concept of art that we still have today.
03:53In fact, much of what we know of the Renaissance
03:56comes from the lives of the artists.
03:58The book's revolutionary message was that artists
04:02weren't just craftsmen, but creative individuals
04:06with profound ideas to express.
04:08Vasari told the stories of all the Renaissance greats.
04:12But his epic is far more than just a list of lives.
04:16Vasari preached the big idea
04:19that the story of art was one of progress,
04:22each artist learning from those who came before.
04:25It's a powerful concept
04:28which has shaped how people practise and teach art to this day.
04:32He really is everywhere.
04:41What a weird coincidence.
04:44Giorgio Vasari's Institute of Superior Instruction.
04:48I love that. You couldn't plan it.
04:5480 kilometres from Florence lies the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
04:58Giorgio Vasari was born in this sleepy place in 1511.
05:04His family had been humble vase makers, hence his name Vasari.
05:11He included his own autobiography in the lives of the artists,
05:15remembering how he'd been discovered when young
05:17by the Tuscan master, Luca Signorelli.
05:20I gave my attention in lesson time to nothing
05:23save to drawing figures.
05:25I remember that the master turned to my father
05:28Antonio and said to him,
05:29Antonio, if you wish little Giorgio not to become backward,
05:33by all means let him learn to draw,
05:35for design cannot be otherwise than helpful,
05:38honourable and advantageous to him.
05:42Even as a grown man,
05:43when he'd become painter and architect
05:45to the Medici dynasty in Florence,
05:47he kept a house here in Arezzo.
05:50The Casa Vasari is now a museum full of Vasari's paintings,
05:59kept exactly as it was in his day.
06:03Welcome to the house of Giorgio Vasari,
06:06the not-so-humble abode of a Renaissance man.
06:08This is his bedroom, and up on the ceiling,
06:10we've got a wonderful, not very good, but very heartfelt, no doubt,
06:15homage to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling,
06:18a figure of God the Father flying through space,
06:21to send Giorgio to sleep every night as he looks upwards.
06:24But here we've got a portrait of Giorgio Vasari himself.
06:28There's the man, surrounded by his painting implements.
06:31Good morning, Giorgio.
06:33Antonio Agnello has been caretaker here for 30 years.
06:37When he started, he knew nothing about Vasari,
06:40but now he's a self-taught expert.
06:42So close to Giorgio, he might almost be family.
06:45The wife of Vasari, Nicolò Sabaci,
06:49who, when she was married, had 14 years old and Vasari had 39 years old.
06:55That's beautiful.
06:56I know that it is not possible,
06:58but if we can take a meal with Giorgio Vasari, how would it be?
07:05He was a lot of companhia.
07:09Most of the time the meal was not long,
07:12it was a short meal,
07:14because Vasari would prefer to work
07:16but not to spend time in the morning.
07:19He, in fact, was an erete of Michelangelo a great painter.
07:25But today, the criticism is great because he wrote the life.
07:30Because if he had not written the life,
07:32he was a normal painter, like the others.
07:34He was a manierist, who was not a great painter.
07:38But Vasari is great not only because he wrote the life,
07:41but Vasari is great because
07:43he had invented the history of art,
07:46writing the life.
07:47He was also a great architect.
07:52He invented the word gallery,
07:54which is the gallery of the office,
07:57which in all the museums of the world
07:59are called gallery.
08:00You and Giorgio Vasari have something in common,
08:06is it true?
08:06Yes.
08:07So, several people have told me it.
08:12Someone tells me if I'm a descendant of Vasari.
08:15It's not true.
08:16It's true.
08:17My origin is from Sicilia.
08:19On the walls, he painted portraits of Greek and Roman artists.
08:25Central to Vasari's thought was the idea of Renaissance,
08:29a revival of the classical past.
08:32This is the real nerve center of the whole house.
08:35For me, it's a wonderful painted capsule of the contents of Giorgio Vasari's mind.
08:41In fact, he's painted some clever little false doorways and so on to make it look a bit grander and
08:46bigger than it actually was.
08:48And this room is really a kind of microcosm of everything that Vasari believes and everything
08:54that he will do.
08:56Now, over here, we've got a figure.
08:58I like to think of it as a kind of figure of Giorgio Vasari himself as a young man.
09:03I think there's a kind of allegory of the progress of the Renaissance artist here.
09:06I like the way his glasses are on the ledge there.
09:08But he's studying.
09:10And above, he encapsulates the personality traits of the characteristics
09:15that you have to have if you're going to get on in life as a narcissist.
09:18You've got to have prudence.
09:19You've got to work hard.
09:20You've got to be honorable.
09:22You've got to have wisdom.
09:25Then you may earn riches, money, very important to Giorgio Vasari.
09:30It's the only way you could count how well you were doing.
09:34Ultimately, the ultimate goal, eternal fame.
09:38But hanging over it all like a rather dark cloud is this painting.
09:44Currently being restored of virtue beset by the figures of fortune and envy,
09:51coiled round by snakes with her withered breasts and gurning expression.
09:57It's a painting that encapsulates Vasari's sense that no artist's life is ever totally straightforward.
10:03There'll always be people out to get you.
10:05And in fact, envy, one way or another, would be one of the driving forces of his whole life.
10:12Like many an aspiring artist from Tuscany,
10:20Vasari made his way to Florence, which, under the patronage of the Medici family,
10:25had become the artistic powerhouse of central Italy.
10:29As an apprentice, he quickly became close with the Medici.
10:34He'd made good contacts right at the start.
10:36Not bad for a 13-year-old.
10:39Florence would be the main stage for the drama of his life.
10:44The scene of his youthful rise.
10:46And although he'd leave the city for years to write his book,
10:48he would return again in triumphant old age.
10:52Florence was the centre of the Renaissance universe, as far as Vasari was concerned.
10:57And if he could stand on top of Brunelleschi's great dome today,
11:01everywhere he'd look, he'd see buildings and places that were really important in his life.
11:06Behind me, the great church of Santa Croce, where Vasari designed the great tomb to Michelangelo,
11:11his hero.
11:12Over to my left, the Palazzo Signoria, where Vasari worked for his patrons, the Medici,
11:17for so many years. Over here, Giotto's Campanile, and on the other side of the Arno,
11:22the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, where Vasari studied the works of Musaccio.
11:28He even describes Florence as this extraordinary seething hothouse incubator of talent,
11:36a place where you have to be really good, really determined to survive.
11:40For him, it was a kind of Renaissance New York.
11:43Florence was a violently competitive place, where painters and sculptors frequently came to blows,
11:50as they fought, quite literally, for the best commissions.
11:53The tough city Vasari knew was a far cry from the tourists' paradise of now,
11:58but you can still touch its brutal past, if you look in the right place.
12:03Today is the feast day of St. John's San Giovanni, the patron saints of Florence,
12:09and they marked the events with a game of Caccio storico, historical football.
12:16Now, traditionally, the players here are actually drawn from Florence's prisons.
12:21This is not one of those historical events that conjures up the image of men in pointy boots.
12:29This is the real deal.
12:34The competing teams are drawn from the different areas of Florence,
12:38and the game takes place in one of the city's most famous squares, Santa Croce,
12:42where Vasari himself lived.
12:48I never did get the rules explained to me.
12:50Renaissance rules. Kill or be killed.
12:55There we go.
12:58Caccio storico is best described as a mix of rugby and boxing, but without the gloves.
13:08The Reds are killing the Blues, literally.
13:12Vasari says, if you want to understand Florence, you've got to understand that this is a city of
13:17cutthroat competition. And when you watch this game,
13:20it's one of the few rituals that actually goes back to Vasari's day. I mean, look at these guys.
13:25You understand it, not as a figure of speech, but as a reality.
13:41So much for the nice, cosy, men in tight view of the Renaissance.
13:57Vasari's lives are full of stories of actual physical violence.
14:01It's GBH, an occupational hazard for any artist.
14:07The famous Michelangelo had his nose broken so badly in one such fist fight,
14:12that it crunched like a biscuit.
14:15There's even one tale of a painter killing another painter in cold blood.
14:26But Florence's rulers were also forever at each other's throats,
14:30as Vasari would find out to his cost.
14:33By the 1530s, when he was in his middle twenties,
14:37he was on the verge of becoming a real name in the city, when disaster struck.
14:44Florence was a city of plot and counter-plot, and within the space of a few short years,
14:49Vasari found that two of his greatest supporters, members of the Medici family,
14:54had been killed in distinctly suspicious circumstances.
15:00After the deaths of his patrons, Vasari felt that he had to flee his beloved Florence.
15:07Vasari wrote that he no longer wished to follow the fortunes of courts, but that of art alone.
15:15His path was set, but if it hadn't been for his misfortune,
15:20he might never have embarked on the epic project of the lives.
15:25Vasari himself wrote a colourful account of how he came to write the lives of the artists,
15:30his magnum opus. And as he tells the story, it was during his wilderness years,
15:35when he's had to leave Florence. He's in Rome, and one evening he's invited to dinner by the great
15:40Cardinal Farnese. All the grand writers of Italy are there. And the Cardinal turns to Vasari and says,
15:47you, Giorgio, why don't you take up the challenge and write the book that we've all been waiting for?
15:53The great account of how Italian art has risen to this Renaissance. And Vasari says, I took up the
16:00challenge. Now, whether it quite happened in that conveniently colourful way, we'll never know.
16:06But the truth is that Vasari did spend the rest of his life largely devoted to this amazing task that
16:13would take him the length and breadth of the boot of Italy, travelling thousands of miles,
16:19doing vast amounts of research to write this extraordinary book.
16:30The final version of his Lives of the Artists appeared in 1568.
16:35Vasari's tale would span more than 300 years and include more than 200 artists.
16:41He divided his story of Italian art into three parts, a kind of bronze, silver and golden age.
16:51Vasari took his basic template from his intellectual hero, the writer Petrarch,
16:57who saw the pattern of all history as a journey from darkness into light.
17:02And it was from Petrarch too, that Vasari took his contempt for the culture of the relatively recent medieval past.
17:12Extraordinary as it might seem to us, he viewed this great Gothic cathedral, Milan's Duomo, as crude and primitive.
17:28The story of the art of the art of the art.
17:40Now, Vasari applied Petrarch's view of history to his own telling of the story of art,
17:45and that obliged him to cast all of this, the splendour of medieval art and architecture, into darkness.
17:52He called it Gothic. He regarded it as barbaric.
17:55Now, they say that every great theory is based on a great mistake, and that was certainly Vasari's biggest blindness.
18:05The splendours of the medieval period were a necessary sacrificial victim for Vasari.
18:11Gothic art was the scapegoat in his theory, and he caricatured it in order to trumpet the art of his own time.
18:18It was the triumph of the Renaissance, as he saw it, to get away from medieval art and revive the classical past.
18:29And for Vasari, the artist who started this great process of recovery, was a man called Nicola Pisano.
18:36His masterpiece lies inside the baptistry in Pisa.
18:45It's a great key, isn't it?
18:46It's a great key.
18:57Primo's let me in at the crack of dawn to have a look round before the hordes of tourists.
19:03Someone should write a poem to the key holders of the great monuments of Italy.
19:07Here it is.
19:09The pulpit of Nicola Pisano.
19:13Wow.
19:15Ah, che bello.
19:17Va bene?
19:18Sì, grazie.
19:19E qui il pulpito.
19:21Questo è il pulpito di Nicola.
19:25E ci sono molti di classicismo in questa pulpit.
19:29C'è una figura di Ercole.
19:31Di Ercole, sì, che sostiene.
19:32Mi ricordo, ma non so dove.
19:34Sì, è qua dietro.
19:35Ah, che bello.
19:39Questo è quasi una figura romana.
19:42Eh sì, Ercole è la forza che sostiene la fede.
19:47Ah sì, è un allegoria.
19:50Sì.
19:57Vasari said that Nicola Pisano was the first truly to embrace the art of Italy's classical past.
20:03And you can really see what he means when you look at this bas-relief.
20:08These utterly classical figures, including a serene and statuesque Madonna, wouldn't look
20:16out of place on an ancient Roman sarcophagus.
20:21In fact, Vasari says that Pisano did base them on an actual sarcophagus in Pisa and his
20:28book even contains directions to it.
20:30It's in the Campo Santo, just around the corner.
20:38When Vasari talks about a renaissance, a revival of classical antiquity, it can seem a bit of an
20:44abstract idea, but here in Pisa it's wonderfully concrete, because you simply walk from Nicola
20:49Pisano's pulpit in the baptistery into the Campo Santo where they kept and they had kept these Roman
20:56sarcophagi for centuries. This had been an ancient Roman burial place. And you can see exactly where
21:03Pisano took his language from. He took it directly from Roman art. Look at this wonderful Roman matron.
21:10But this is Pisano's Madonna. This is Pisano's Hercules.
21:24In Italy, classical antiquity had never really gone away. It's that artists of that generation
21:30began to look at classical art with a new eye. They looked to it for their own language.
21:40But one artist took the lessons in realism that Nicola Pisano had learned from ancient sculpture
21:55and applied them to painting. He was the real hero of part one, the Lives Bronze Age,
22:01and Vasari told his story as if he were writing the life of a prophet.
22:06For Giorgio Vasari, one great artist was single-handedly responsible for rescuing painting from
22:13the barbarism of the Dark Ages and bringing it into the light. This prophet of a new dawn
22:19was a man from the fertile heartland of Italy, from Vasari's own native province of Tuscany,
22:26and his name was Giotto.
22:34Giotto was born in 1267, and Vasari tells a memorable tale about how this prodigy
22:40was discovered by the older painter Cimabue, later to be his master.
22:44One day, in Vasari's words, Cimabue found Giotto drawing a sheep from nature upon a smooth and
22:52solid rock with a pointed stone. Cimabue, marvelling at him, stopped and asked him if
22:57he would go and be with him. And the boy answered that if his father were content, he would gladly go.
23:03This story has the quality of a parable, in which Giotto, the humble boy among his sheep,
23:11is destined by God to raise art in Italy to a new level. However their relationship actually began,
23:17Giotto was taught by Cimabue, but soon eclipsed him. And Vasari was certainly not exaggerating
23:25when he said that Giotto breathed new life into Italian art.
23:29One of his most moving frescoes, depicting the death of Saint Francis,
23:34can be found in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.
23:40I think one of the things that makes Giotto's art so affecting is the fact that his style is
23:44actually based on sculpture. If you look at the figure of Saint Francis, he could almost be a
23:50medieval effigy sculpture. That's exactly what makes his painting so emotional, because
23:55it's as if hard, unyielding stone sculptures have been animated by human emotion. And Vasari puts his
24:03finger on the nature of Giotto's contribution to the history of Italian painting very well, I think.
24:09He says, it's as if Giotto taught painting to cry. He's put tears into the language of art. And the funny
24:16thing is that this chapel contains, if you like, a little art history lesson, because on the altar
24:22itself, there's a much earlier Byzantine-style life of Saint Francis. And if you compare the stiff
24:30and rather emotionless figures in that painting with those in Giotto's, I think you can really see, just
24:39illustrated a few metres apart from each other, that great wrenching revolution in art that Giotto enacted.
24:49Vasari said that Giotto's greatest masterpieces were the paintings he did for the Arena Chapel in Pagio.
24:54They showed the full extent of his genius. But for Vasari, they were also a miracle of technique.
25:06And to illustrate Giotto's God-given ability, he told the story of what he called Giotto's O.
25:18One day, Vasari says, the artist was challenged to prove his genius,
25:22and in response, he simply reached for a brush dipped in red paint and drew a perfect circle
25:29in a single gesture.
25:37Vasari's fable, the original instance of less is more, is one of the most famous stories in all of the lives.
25:44I think the tale of Giotto's O is fundamentally Vasari's way of saying that draughtsmanship lies
25:54at the heart of Tuscan art, because Giotto is the Moses, the first prophet of Tuscan painting.
26:01It's very important that he should have been a perfect draughtsman, and that's what this story of the O
26:07fundamentally symbolizes. But I think it's also a story about innate talent. Giotto can just do it.
26:17And the fact that he's just a shepherd boy. Art, for Vasari, it's a very important point,
26:23a message in all the lives. Art is the one place, if you like, in the whole of this complex structure of
26:31stratified renaissance society where someone can simply rise up on their own merits. And it's Vasari's
26:37story too, not just Giotto's, because Vasari is himself a humble son of a vase maker who's made it big time.
26:46To write his lives, Vasari travelled tirelessly, visiting artists' workshops all over Italy to get
26:52first-hand information. That world of the artist artisan has almost disappeared. But I think that
27:02you can still get a rare flavour of it here in the little Tuscan town of Montepulciano. I've come to
27:08meet Cesare, who I think of as a kind of living relic. He's a modest coppersmith, but just like the
27:16painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, he's the embodiment of a whole craft tradition and just the
27:22kind of man that Vasari would have visited to gather his oral history.
27:26Buongiorno. Buongiorno Cesare. Buongiorno, buongiorno a voi. Benvenuti a Montepulciano. Bene.
27:35Che facciamo? Questo è il forno? Si. Per me è una grandissima fortuna, bellezza, gioia, perché sto
27:45prendo ancora gli anni di mio nonno, mio gran fratello.
27:51His family have been coppersmiths for nearly 200 years, but he has no apprentice, so he's the last
27:57of his kind. Questa, vi devo dire che ho iniziato a sei anni e a sei anni la mattina andavo scuola e il giorno dovevo
28:09dopo pranzo fino alla sera. Ora ho 72. Questo mi ricorda Pandero ragazzo.
28:23Posso? Si. No, ecco, sta girando al contrario. Sta girando al contrario. Bene. Oh, è troppo. Finalmente ho trovato l'apprendista.
28:35Non bella paura, tanto il fumo va da belli e brutti da cieca.
28:47Cesare's proverbs and stories are just the kind of raw material that Vasari would have worked with.
28:53And he's even got his own version of Vasari's famous fable about Giotto's O, even if he's not quite as concise
29:01and the story isn't quite as grand.
29:05I think this is Giotto's...
29:07Questa, ecco perché si riferisce a Giotto, il tondo, il tonno di Giotto.
29:13Vede questa qui, mio padre, l'ho ritrovata due anni fa.
29:18La mia prima pentola fatta. Ah, la mia prima pentola?
29:22La mia prima? Sì, sì.
29:24Quanti anni? Sì, sì.
29:25Ma io ho trovato nascosta.
29:27Sì.
29:28Ho trovato tutta una parte nascosta in una buca qui nel mio laboratorio.
29:32Appena tutta sporca. Sì.
29:35Nel pulirla, va bene, è venuto fuori la data.
29:40Questa è la sua versione di Giotto's O, il suo suo primo perfetto ciclo.
29:47Ma un momento, finisco.
29:49Sì, sì, ma...
29:50Perché lei mi ha detto Giotto?
29:52Allora, mio papà , appena l'ho ritrovata...
29:55Sì, sì.
29:56Ma mi ha guardato otto e mezzo.
29:59Perché?
30:00Perché se lei la guarda, non è come il tondo di Giotto.
30:05È un pochino perfetta.
30:07Ah, no.
30:08So, I'm wrong.
30:10Ecco me.
30:11It wasn't quite Giotto's circle,
30:12because his father, on it he's got his father's mark.
30:15He gave him eight and a half out of ten.
30:17A Fellini-esque eight and a half out of ten.
30:21Grazie.
30:23Giotto giovanile.
30:25Ok, poi gli voglio, ultimamente, gli voglio far vedere delle cose bellissime.
30:37Yeah, yeah, yeaha.
30:38What?
30:39Here's the port points.
30:41Inotivevermi!
30:43Qu'è è ilayerne, sia da secò io.
30:45Un esame.
30:46Io padre.
30:48Qui voleva vita di Giotto?
30:50Given the rambling mass of stories that he'd collected,
30:52one of Vasari's greatest challenges was structure.
30:55structure, how to give his epic tale a clear shape. The second part of the lives, his silver
31:02age, lasts pretty much for the whole of the 15th century. It's very much a Florentine
31:08story, but Vasari, inspired by patterns of myth and the Bible, made it a universal tale.
31:16Giotto, the great prophet of part one, is now succeeded by three other geniuses, a holy
31:23trinity of art, Masaccio, Donatello, and Brunelleschi. Like him, they're described as miracle workers,
31:33each taking the Renaissance to yet greater heights. And no one has left a more visible
31:38mark on the Florentine skyline than the architect, Filippo Brunelleschi. His dome for Florence
31:46Cathedral was completed in 1436, and is still considered a triumph of engineering.
31:53It's as though the sky is envious, wrote Vasari, as it keeps on shooting thunderbolts down
32:00at it, believing that its height has almost exceeded the height of air.
32:10The dome was based on Rome's pantheon, but there's another building in Florence that shows
32:15Brunelleschi's debt to the ancient world even more clearly.
32:27Vasari tells us that Brunelleschi was the first to revive the forms and the styles of ancient
32:33Roman architecture. And although he's famous for having created the great dome on top of
32:38Florence Cathedral, I think it's this building, the so-called Patti Chapel, that's really Brunelleschi's
32:43greatest surviving masterpiece. And it's full of ancient Roman references, this portico,
32:48which looks so much like an ancient Roman triumphal arch.
32:55And this is the Pazzi Chapel itself, so named because it was paid for by the Pazzi family,
33:01who were once big wheels in Florence until they made the mistake of conspiring against the
33:06Roman Empire. And he made it she who made sure that the entire family was killed off forever.
33:11Now for his Pazzi patrons, Brunelleschi designed what is, in essence, a Christian chapel in the form
33:19of an ancient Roman centrally planned temple. And it's absolutely beautiful, it's so simple. You can feel
33:28that this is classical architecture revived by somebody who only really knows it through ruins. So there's this
33:34wonderful spareness about it. Of course, an ancient Roman building wouldn't have been anything like
33:38as plain as this. But Brunelleschi has really created a space that's all about solid and void and
33:45symmetry, divine symmetry. When I was young, I didn't really respond to architecture. I think I had this
33:54prejudice that it didn't have enough ideas in it, it didn't have enough to get your teeth into. I
33:58preferred literature, painting, sculpture. I think this space was one of the first pieces of pure
34:05architecture to persuade me that that rather naive idea was completely wrong. Because of course,
34:10this building is full of ideas. It's a monument to Brunelleschi's conceptual rigour. What he's done is
34:16he's asked himself a very simple question. How can I use the language of classical architecture to create
34:22a Christian experience? Brunelleschi's friend and the second of Vasari's Silver Age heroes, Donatello,
34:40was born here in Florence in 1386.
34:43His work posed a challenge to Vasari's schematic view that everything Gothic is bad and everything
34:53classical is good. Because while Donatello did draw heavily on ancient Rome, his sculpture still had
35:00deep roots in Gothic art. But to Vasari's credit, he instinctively responded to Donatello's blend of
35:10classical style and medieval mysticism.
35:18I think it's almost impossible for someone living in the 21st century to really recapture
35:23the effect that a sculpture such as this by Donatello must have had on the first generation of people
35:28who saw it. The realism, the lifelikeness, the way in which he's conjured up the ideal of the penitent
35:37Magdalene. Someone who's starved themselves, who's mortified the flesh in order to get closer to God.
35:43He's conjured that up. He's actually embodied it. He's shown us what that must have meant physically.
35:49Look at her emaciation, her toothless mouth, her intense gaze. I think there was almost this sense
35:58that the first Renaissance artists to recapture that kind of realism, Donatello above all,
36:04they were almost seen as black magicians, necromancers. How was it possible to create
36:11something as lifelike as this, a sculpture that might almost be alive? You almost expect her to speak to
36:18you. I think Vasari gets to the heart of that idea of the Renaissance artist almost as a conjurer or a
36:26sorcerer, a Prometheus, a Pygmalion. In a tale he tells about another of Donatello's sculptures.
36:35In his own lifetime, almost his most celebrated work, it's called the Zuccone of Pumpkin Head,
36:41and it's the prophet Habakkuk. And Vasari tells us that when Donatello was at work on this,
36:46in his studio, chiselling away, he would actually shout at the sculpture,
36:52speak to me, speak to me, plague upon you, speak to me. It's that idea, as Leonardo da Vinci said,
37:00that the Renaissance artist is a kind of god who can make his own reality.
37:05He is a kind of black magician.
37:20The last of his holy trinity of artists, Vasari argued, completely redefined what was possible
37:43in painting. Masaccio died when he was just 26, but what he left behind changed the course of Western art.
38:01The Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine was really one of the holy places
38:07of all of Italian painting for Vasari because he believed that Masaccio,
38:15as Donatello had done in sculpture, he believed that Masaccio had really recaptured for painting
38:23the ability to capture life, to capture reality as it is in art. Now, Vasari on Masaccio is Vasari at
38:32his very best, because you might have perhaps expected, because of his huge admiration for Masaccio,
38:36that his prose might have had the odd empty flourish in it, but it's fantastically precise.
38:42And what he calls our attention to in his descriptions of these paintings is all kinds of sort of details
38:50that you might not otherwise have picked up, and they're tremendously specific. He says, for example,
38:54the artists who come just before Masaccio, the thing that makes them less impressive as observers of
39:02human reality is the way in which they paint the feet. He says that they paint the feet as if on tiptoe
39:07or dancing, whereas Masaccio really places the feet on the ground. They feel absolutely rooted,
39:14and that's right. You know, when you look at this picture, it's the feet that catch your gaze, the way in
39:19which the toes are splayed out on the red earth. That's what gives Christ and the other apostles
39:24this fantastic sense of monumentality. And looking up over there at the scene of the baptism, again,
39:30Vasari gives us a wonderful sense of not just his own insight, but I think also of how he must have
39:37talked about these paintings with his friends. And what he points out is the way in which the figure
39:43behind is shivering. And I think it's probably the first painting of a shiver in all of Western art.
39:50And surprisingly, Masari doesn't talk much in detail about the final scene that you see as you leave
40:00the chapel, which is this wonderful depiction of Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden.
40:07And here, as well as that tremendous sense of physical realism, we can see Masaccio as a real genius
40:18when it comes to the painting of psychological pain, this terrible pain. The face of Eve, that agonized
40:27whale. It's all the misery of humanity compressed into one face, one body. It's an incredibly powerful painting.
40:35You know that Vasari really loved Masaccio. I mean, he writes about these paintings like somebody who's
40:43visited them again and again and again, that they're etched into his mind. And it's, you know,
40:49it's a privilege to be able to read him and see exactly what he saw. And when you can do that,
40:55you know, you really realize what a fantastic writer he was.
40:59For Vasari, Masaccio was one of the great innovators. The idea of progress,
41:08which he spelt out so clearly in his life of the artist, was central to Vasari's whole history.
41:15In fact, it's one of his most influential concepts.
41:18Vasari is very good on the idea of art as a collaborative collective enterprise. In fact,
41:24his favorite metaphor for the whole Italian Renaissance is to see all of the artists together
41:29as a group of mountaineers ascending a great range of peaks. In fact, he compares Masaccio precisely to
41:36a climber who's cleared away difficulties for those who's going to follow after him. Now, I think it's
41:42fascinating that Picasso, at the start of the 20th century, when he and Braque together invent
41:47cubism, says, George and I were roped together like mountaineers. But it was Vasari, hundreds of
41:54years before, who'd first given expression to that idea. It's important to remember that Vasari was the
42:02very first serious art critic. So throughout his great book, he's making it up as he goes along,
42:08inventing the very discipline he's working in. He was deeply sensitive, but the language of art
42:14appreciation didn't yet exist. So he was forced into all kinds of other ingenious ways of expressing himself.
42:25I think the most fascinating example of this is his darkest tale of all. It's the story of two
42:32intertwined lives and a murder. The villain was an artist called Andrea del Castaño. The victim,
42:40the man who thought of Castaño as his brother, Domenico Veneziano. It's a classic tale of Renaissance
42:48rivalry in which, eaten up by professional jealousy, Andrea decides to kill the sweet and unsuspecting Domenico.
42:56The denouement of Vasari's tale is startling and brutal. When Domenico was on his way home,
43:06Vasari wrote, Andrea came up to him, crushed his loot and his stomach at one and the same time with
43:12certain pieces of lead. And then, thinking that he had not yet finished him off, beat him grievously on
43:19the head with the same weapons. Finally, leaving him on the ground, he returned to his room where he put the
43:26door ajar and sat down to his drawing. Now, the final twist in the tale of the diabolical Andrea
43:34del Castaño would come nearly 500 years after Vasari had wrapped up his parable of evil. And it would
43:42come with the rediscovery of Castaño's greatest work, this Last Supper. It's an extraordinary picture.
43:51He's depicted the moment when Christ has told his disciples, one of you will betray me. And you see
43:58there different expressions of anguish, bewilderment, and guilt, in the case of Judas, written on their faces.
44:06Now, this really is the picture that established Andrea del Castaño from modern times as a kind of
44:12missing link between Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci, because this was the first truly great monumental
44:18depiction of the Last Supper in Florentine art, and therefore the direct predecessor of Leonardo
44:25da Vinci's most famous work. Now, what this did was it prompted art historians and historians to reopen
44:34the long-closed case of Andrea del Castaño. They went back to the archives, they tried to find out a bit
44:40more about him, and guess what one of them found in one of the archives here in Florence? Well, it was a
44:46little document which tells us that Andrea del Castaño died here in this city of the plague in 1457, deep
44:56rule to be precise. Now, that might not sound like much, but we happen to know for a fact that Domenico
45:03Veneziano died in 1461. That would make this the only known case in history of a murderer dying four
45:13years before the man he killed.
45:20I think it's no coincidence that at the centre of Andrea del Castaño's most accomplished work,
45:26there's a powerful image of betrayal and death. The gentle face of Christ juxtaposed with the dark
45:33scheming Judas. And above them, like a bloody premonition of Christ's death, is a wall panel
45:42that appears to be bleeding. I think this extraordinary detail possessed Vasari's imagination.
45:51And I think that's why he made up his story of a murder.
45:55It was his own fictional equivalent to the most powerful image in Castaño's art.
46:06Vasari cast Castaño as Judas to Domenico's Christ, in a story punctuated just like the painting,
46:15by a great splash of blood.
46:29Some people think less of Vasari because of his myths and fabrications.
46:34But I think they're central to his genius.
46:36Vasari's an art historian's dream, because after all, if he hadn't written down all this information,
46:45we'd know next to nothing about the lives of all the great artists of the Renaissance. But on the other
46:50hand, he's also a nightmare, because his lives are absolutely full of falsehoods, fabrications,
46:57tall tales. I sometimes think that the lives of the artist should be spelt without the V. It should be the
47:02lies of the artist. Think of the tale of Fra Filippo Lippi, the sex-obsessed painter, who abducts a nun
47:09so that he can have his way with her, or Fra Angelico, who's the opposite. He's so pious,
47:14he can't finish a painting because he keeps crying into his pigment. But on the other hand, although
47:19Vasari tells these lies, these falsehoods, he's constantly inventing stories. I think that often
47:25his fictions are a way of getting at the truth. They're his way of expressing what he really feels.
47:32is the centre of an artist's work. So while Fra Angelico may never actually have wept into his
47:41paintings, they are clearly the work of a deeply pious man. Likewise, Fra Lippo Lippi may not have
47:50been a sex maniac, but he was clearly a connoisseur of the barely veiled female form.
47:55For me, Vasari's fictions are often a creative response to the art he's talking about.
48:11Vasari ends part two of his lives, The Silver Age, with Luca Signorelli, who, he argues,
48:18clears the way for the giants who will bring his story to its climax. The hilltop town of Orvieto
48:24contains Signorelli's greatest works. For me, his frescoes in the cathedral, begun in 1499,
48:33are an achievement worthy of comparison with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling,
48:39which was indeed partly inspired by these extraordinary works.
48:53This really is one of the most jaw-dropping fresco cycles ever painted. And even though
48:59Vasari praised them to the skies, they're still a surprisingly little-known treasure.
49:04What they depict, with startling vividness and an almost comic-strip vigour, is the end of the world.
49:15Showers of blood rain down on panicking crowds of humanity. The Antichrist delivers his evil sermon,
49:25the devil whispering in his ear. Strange beasts fly through the air as the damned are hurried off to hell.
49:34By demons with alarmingly green bottoms.
49:47The dead heave themselves out of the ground, as the last trumpet is blown.
49:55Signorelli's even added a painted audience of the great Italian poets,
50:00including Dante, with his own visions of heaven and hell.
50:05For Vasari, Signorelli was one of those artists who weaves together all the different strands of
50:11what has come before, and creates them into the fabric of a vision that seems to predict the future.
50:16For Vasari, Signorelli combined Giotto's genius with Masaccio's sense of sacred drama, all expressed in a language that looks directly back to the classical past.
50:29For Vasari, Signorelli pulls all of these things together, but pushes them into the future by
50:38setting everything on a vastly enlarged, monumental scale.
50:42This is the scale of Raphael and Michelangelo. This is the scale of the High Renaissance, and
50:46Vasari says so. He says, Michelangelo's art would not have been possible without that of Signorelli.
50:52One generation climbs on the shoulders of the next.
50:55But it doesn't quite end there, because for Vasari himself, Signorelli was a crucial figure in his own life.
51:06When he looked up at that self-portrait, he looked with gratitude, because when he was a boy,
51:12Signorelli had come to Arezzo and had said to Vasari's father, that boy has talent.
51:17Encourage him in the career of artist and he will go far. So, Vasari's conception of art history as a kind of collaboration,
51:27as one person helping another, is epitomized by Signorelli not only on, if you like, the cosmic level,
51:34but at the personal level. He was the artist who, Vasari felt he, if you like, held his own hand
51:40and encouraged him and said, yeah, come and be an artist. Come and join us.
51:47Vasari's so well known as the author of the lives of the artists, and so forgotten as a painter and architect in his own right,
52:02that most of the millions of people who flock every year to Florence's famous Uffizi don't even know that he designed it.
52:09I'm not here to visit the main museum, but a secret rooftop passage that Vasari also designed.
52:19The Vasari corridor is notoriously difficult to gain access to, but it contains one of the world's great secret art collections.
52:27And for me, it is Vasari's lives of the artists in bricks and mortar.
52:34Leading me into this last labyrinth is a less than talkative lady called Rita.
52:39The oldest problem in the world is trying to... You get access, but whether you can actually get in or not.
52:49See?
52:50Why?
52:51Do you want me?
52:53Do you want me to open it?
52:53See, see, if you can.
52:57Okay.
53:00Wow.
53:01Welcome to the Vasari corridor.
53:05Here we are.
53:06There's Giorgio, man himself.
53:10One of the things I love about the Vasari corridor is the fact, just the fact of its name, partly,
53:15because Giorgio Vasari was a man who desperately wanted to get into the corridors of power.
53:22And here he is actually building the Medici's principal corridor of power, a literal corridor
53:28that expresses their power, because he built it. It's three kilometres or more in length,
53:33and he built it to connect the Pitti Palace, which the Medici had taken over in the course
53:38of the 16th century, to the Palazzo del Signore, the seat of Florentine government,
53:43which they'd also taken over.
53:45And Vasari was given the job, so he's done it.
53:50Walking around Florence, you'd be forgiven for not even noticing that the corridor floats above you.
53:55But it carves a path right through the city, even over the Ponte Vecchio itself.
54:02What's great about this corridor now is that a hundred years after Vasari's death,
54:18an enlightened Medici, Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, had the wonderful idea
54:23of establishing the world's first ever museum of artists' self-portraits. And that's what this is.
54:32And in fact, that was based on an idea by Giorgio Vasari, who expressed the hope that one day
54:37it would establish a collection of artists' self-portraits. So here it is. It continues all
54:43the way until the 20th century, so that you can map the development of the artist's self-portrait
54:49right the way back from the Renaissance, from Giorgio himself, all the way up into the 20th century.
54:55So that's a living organism.
55:10Look, there's Rubens. Peter Paul Rubens.
55:14This is a wonderful one. What I love about this collection is that there's so much eccentricity,
55:30much eccentricity in this collection. Look, this is a portrait of a man I must admit I've never heard of,
55:37an 18th century Flemish artist, Nicholas van der Brak. I assume he was a, he was a, a Flemish still-life
55:45painter. So here he is. He scratched his way through a still-life painting and he's peeking out.
55:53Isn't that great? Hello. Let me out. I'm a still-life painter.
56:01It's definitely a collection with a sense of humor, but it's stuffed with masterpieces. As well as the
56:08Rubens, there are works by Titian. There's a very serious Rembrandt and a wonderfully swaggering
56:16Bernini. They even have a Leonardo of rather dubious authenticity. One of the things that I find really
56:23moving about the experience of walking through the Vasari corridor crossing the centuries is the,
56:29is the idea or the very strong sensation that one's witnessing a kind of private conversation
56:37between generation after generation of artists. And it's enhanced by the fact that you know almost
56:42no one else ever gets to visit this place. And that sense of developing artistic consciousness that
56:48we see so clearly mapped out here. It's, it's really beautiful. I mean, the way that we begin with
56:55the Renaissance artists, you know, very reserved, rather looking over each other's shoulders,
57:00jockeying for court position. Then you move forward to the baroque, which is full of flourish,
57:04and still we move forward. Now we're into the modern period. The artist, his eyes are full of angst.
57:11The artist, the artist who wants to buttonhole us, to show us how avant-garde he is.
57:18Vasari was really the first artist to dare to give expression to the notion of artistic
57:24self-consciousness, to suggest that artists were people worth knowing, worth remembering,
57:29worth memorializing. And the fact is that it's wonderfully appropriate that the corridor that bears
57:35his name, as his name, should have been turned into a museum that is actually driven by his biggest
57:41idea, namely the notion that the whole history of art is itself a grand continuum, a kind of relay race
57:48with artist after artist passing on the baton of inspiration through the centuries from the Renaissance
57:55and on into the future. Let's smoke a cigar to Georgia.
58:12And travels with Vasari continues next Monday here on BBC HD. Next tonight though, we're going green with life.
58:25We'll see you next time.
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