A BROTHER AND DEAR FRIEND
ROBERT MACLEHOSE, M.A.
OBIIT APRIL 18, 1907
PREFATORY NOTE
The title page indicates the general responsibility for the different parts of the work now offered to the reader. It should be said however that the editor has revised the translation especially in those portions which deal with technical matters, while the translator has contributed to the matter incorporated in the Notes. The translation was in great part written during a sojourn near Florence, and opportunity was taken to elucidate some of the author’s expressions by conversation with Italian artificers and with scholars conversant with the Tuscan idiom.
The text has been translated without omissions, and the rendering has been made as literal as is consistent with clearness and with a reasonable regard for the English tongue. In the two editions issued in Vasari’s lifetime the chapters are numbered continuously from one to thirty-five through the three divisions of the work, but in more modern editions each division has its chapters separately numbered. The latter arrangement has been followed, but the continuous numbers of the chapters have been added in brackets. With the view of assisting the reader the text has also been broken up into numbered sections, each with its heading, though there is no arrangement of the kind in the original.
The shorter notes at the foot of the pages are intended to explain the author’s meaning, which is not always very clear, and to help to identify and localize buildings and objects mentioned in the text. A certain number of the notes, the longer of which have been placed at the ends of the three divisions, afford an opportunity for discussing more general questions of historical or aesthetic interest raised by Vasari.
A number of plates and figures in the text have been added, some of which are illustrative of Vasari’s descriptions, while others give representations of unpublished objects, and examples of the different kinds of artistic work included in the scope of the treatise. Our acknowledgements for permission to reproduce are due to the authorities of the Print-Room, British Museum, and the National Art Library; to Signor Giacomo Brogi at Florence; and to others to whom we have expressed our thanks in the text.
Vasari’s unit of measurement is the ‘braccio,’ and this term has been retained in place of the more familiar English equivalent ‘cubit.’ Vasari’s braccio seems to be equal to about twenty-three inches or fifty-eight centimetres. This equation is given by Aurelio Gotti, and agrees with various dimensions Vasari ascribes to monuments that can now be measured. A smaller unit is the ‘palmo,’ and this is not, as might be supposed, the breadth of a hand, but what we should rather call a ‘span,’ that is the space that can be covered by a hand trying to stretch an octave, and may be reckoned at about nine inches.
In the matter of proper names, Vasari’s own forms have in most cases been followed in the text, but not necessarily in the commentary.