To some of the readers of the original issue of Vasari’s work these technical chapters proved of special interest, for we find a Flemish correspondent writing to him to say that on the strength of the information therein contained he had made practical essays in art, not wholly without success. This same correspondent, as Vasari tells us in the chapter on Flemish artists at the end of the Lives, hearing that the work was to be reprinted, wrote in the name of many of his compatriots to urge Vasari to prefix to the new edition a more extended disquisition on sculpture, painting, and architecture, with illustrative designs, so as to enforce the rules of art after the fashion of Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, and other artists. This seemed however to Vasari to involve too great an alteration in the scheme of his work, and in the edition of 1568 he preserved the original form of the Introduction, though he incorporated with it considerable additions. It is worth noting that the increase is chiefly in the earlier part, as if Vasari began his revision with the intention of carrying out the suggestion of his correspondents, but gave up the idea of substantial enlargement as he went on. For example the first chapter in the ‘Introduction’ to Architecture is half as long again in the second as in the first edition, and Architecture generally is increased by a third part, while in Sculpture the additions are trifling. The total additions amount to nearly one seventh of the whole. The matter thus added is in general illustrative of the previous text, and adduces further examples of work under review. It is this extended Introduction of the second, or 1568, edition, which is now completely translated and issued with the needful commentary.
The reputation of the writer and the value of his world-renowned biographies naturally give importance to matter which he has deliberately prefixed to these, and it is somewhat surprising that though the text has been constantly printed it has not been annotated, and that it has never yet been rendered as a whole into English, nor, as far as can be ascertained, into any other European language.
Ernst Berger, in his learned and valuable Beiträge zur Entwicklungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik, vierte Folge, München, 1901, does justice to Vasari’s Treatise, of which, as he says, ‘the thirty-five chapters contain a complete survey of the manual activities of the time, in connection with which Vasari gives us very important information on the condition of technique in the sixteenth century,’ and he translates the chapters relating to painting with one or two useful notes. There was apparently an intention of editing Vasari’s Introduction in the Vienna series of Technical Treatises (Quellenschriften) but the project was not carried out. Anglo-Saxon readers will note that the chapters do not appear in the classic English translation by Mrs Jonathan Foster, nor in the American reprint of selected Lives lately edited with annotations by Blashfield and Hopkins; they are omitted also from the French translation by Leclanché, and from that into German by Ludwig Schorn. Mrs Foster explains that she only meant to translate the Lives and not Vasari’s ‘other works’; while the German editor, though he admits the value of the technical chapters to the artist, thinks that the latter ‘would have in any case to go to the original because many of the technical terms would not be intelligible in translation.’
On this it may be remarked that the chapters in question are not ‘other works’ in the sense in which we should use the term in connection with Vasari’s Letters, and the ‘Ragionamenti,’ or description of his own performances in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, that are all printed by Milanesi in the Sansoni edition of Vasari’s works. The chapters are distinctly a part, and a valuable part, of the main work of the author, and it is difficult to see any valid reason why they should ever have been dissociated from it. With regard to the reason for omission given by the German editor, surely the resources of the translator’s art are not so limited as he supposed! It may be claimed, at any rate, that in what follows a conscientious effort has been made to find technical terms in English equivalent to Vasari’s, and yet intelligible to the reader. Where such terms do not seem to be clear, a footnote has been added in explanation.
It is probable that the real reason of the neglect of Vasari’s Introduction by his translators has been the fact that when these translations were made, more than half-a-century ago, not much interest was taken by the reading public in the technical processes of the arts, and this part of Vasari’s work was passed over in order not to delay the reader anxious for the biographical details the author presents in so lively a fashion. At the present time, largely as a result of the inspiring influence of William Morris alike upon the craftsmen and the artistic public, people have been generally awakened to the interest and importance of these questions of technique, and a new translator of Vasari would certainly not be betrayed into this omission. The present translation and commentary may therefore claim to fill a gap that ought never to have been suffered to exist, and on this ground to need no explanation nor apology. Some English writers on the technique of the arts, such as Mrs Merrifield and the late G. T. Robinson, have made considerable use of the material that Vasari has placed before students in these Introductory Chapters, and the practical service that they have thus rendered is an additional reason why they should be brought as a whole in convenient form before English readers.
Readers familiar with Vasari’s Lives will miss in the technical Introduction much of the charm and liveliness of style in which they have been wont to delight. Vasari indeed had a natural gift for biographical writing. He had a sense of light and shade and of contrast in colouring that animates his literary pictures, and is the secret of the fascination of his work, while it explains at the same time some of its acknowledged defects. Above all things he will have variety. If one artist have been presented to the reader of the Lives as a man of the world in constant touch with his fellows, the next artist who comes forward on the stage is a recluse. If one be open and free, another is secretive and brooding; the artist jealous of his brother’s fame and envious of his secrets is contrasted with the genial companion ready to impart all he knows to his less fortunate compeer. In bringing out these picturesque comparisons, the writer sometimes forces the note, and is a little more regardful of effect than of strict biographical accuracy,[[1]] and this accounts for some of the censure which in the modern critical age has fallen to the lot of the Aretine.
The technical disquisitions in the Introduction afford little opportunity for picturesque writing of this kind, and they must be judged from another standpoint. They have certain obvious defects that are however counterbalanced by qualities of much value. Vasari’s treatment in many parts lacks system and completeness, his statement is wanting in clearness, his aesthetic comments are often banal. On the other hand there are sections or chapters of great, even enthralling, interest, as when he discourses with all a Florentine’s enthusiasm on the virile and decided handling of a master in fresco painting; or lets us follow step by step from the small sketch to the finished casting the whole process of making a great bronze statue. Throughout the treatise moreover, we have the advantage of hearing a practical craftsman speaking about the processes and materials with which he is himself familiar, for Vasari, though he did not put his own hand to nearly all the kinds of work he describes, yet was all his life a professional, in intimate touch with craftsmen in every branch of artistic production. If he did not make painted glass windows, he at any rate designed for them. His mural work involved modelled and stamped plaster enrichment and wood carving, while his sections on different processes of decoration for temporary purposes derive a personal interest from the fact that the writer was a famous expert in the construction and adornment of showy fabrics for pageants and state entries, of which his own letters give us many details. If he be unavoidably tedious in his description of the Orders of Architecture, he enlivens this by a digression on his own devices in the masonry of the Uffizi palace. The august figure of Michelangelo sometimes crosses the page, and in the midst of the rather copious eulogies of which Vasari is lavish, we find here and there some record of a word or work of Buonarroti which reminds us of the author’s intimate personal relation to the master whom he calls in a letter ‘il mio rarissimo e divinissimo Vecchio.’
Vasari’s general intention in this Introduction he explains at the close of the ‘Proemio’ to the whole work that precedes the technical chapters. The Introduction is primarily to instruct ‘every gracious spirit in the most noble matters that appertain to the artistic professions’; and next in order, ‘for his delight and service, to give him to know in what qualities the various masters differed among themselves, and how they adorned and how they benefitted each in his own way their country’; and finally to enable any one that wills to gain advantage from the labour and cunning of those who in times past have excelled in the arts. Architecture will be shown to be the most universal, the most necessary, and the most useful of human arts, for whose service and adornment the other two arts exist; the different qualities of stones will be demonstrated, with the styles of building and their proper proportions, and the characteristics of good designs and good construction. Next in order comes Sculpture, and here will be shown the manner of working statues, in their correct forms and proportions, and the qualities that make sculpture good, ‘with all the directions for work that are most secret and most precious.’ Lastly, the treatment of Painting will include design; the methods of colouring and of carrying out a picture; the characteristics of painting and its subordinate branches, with mosaics of every sort, niello work, enamels, damascening, and finally engravings after pictures.
Vasari’s treatise does not stand alone but is only one among many technical and theoretical essays which have come down to us from various epochs both of the middle ages and of the Renaissance. The nature and the value of it will be best understood if we compare it with one or two representative publications of a similar kind, contemporary with it or of earlier date. The comparison will serve to show the spirit in which Vasari writes, and to exhibit the strong and the weak points in his work.
About the middle of the last century, a number of technical treatises and collections of recipes, from MSS. of the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, were edited and published by Mrs Merrifield, and the acumen and accuracy with which she fulfilled her laborious task are warmly eulogized by Dr Albert Ilg, the learned editor of Theophilus and Cennini in the Vienna Quellenschriften. The most important of existing treatises of the kind are however not included in Mrs Merrifield’s work, though they have been translated and edited separately both by her and by other scholars. The recent publication by Ernst Berger noticed above gives the most complete account of all this technical literature. Those of the early treatises or tracts that consist in little more than collections of recipes need not detain us, and the only works of which we need here take account are the following: (1) The Schedula Diversarum Artium of Theophilus, a compendium of the decorative arts as they were practised in the mediaeval monastery, drawn up by a German monk of the eleventh or twelfth century; (2) Il Libro dell’ Arte, o Trattato della Pittura of the Florentine painter Cennino Cennini, written in the early part of the fifteenth century; (3) The De Re Aedificatoria and the tracts Della Pittura and Della Scultura, written rather later and in quite a different vein, by the famous Florentine humanist and artist Leon Battista Alberti; (4) Benvenuto Cellini’s treatises, Sopra l’ Oreficeria e la Scultura, that belong to the same period as Vasari’s own Introduction, and partly cover the same ground. There are later treatises, such as Borghini’s Il Riposo, 1584; Armenini’s Dei veri Precetti della Pittura, 1587; Pacheco’s Arte de la Pintura, 1649; Palomino’s El Museo Pictorico, etc., 1715–24, which all contain matter of interest, but need not be specially noticed in this place. Some of these later writers depend very largely on Vasari.