Vasari on technique

by Giorgio Vasari

The fact just stated about the treatises of Cellini and Vasari suggests the question whether the two are independent, or, if borrowing existed, which treatise owes most to this adventitious aid. The dates of Vasari’s two editions have already been given. Cellini’s two Trattati first appeared in 1568 the same year as Vasari’s second edition, and there exists a second recension of his text which formed the basis of Milanesi’s edition of 1857, republished in 1893. It is worth noting that Vasari’s account of bronze casting, in which we should expect reliance on Cellini, appears in full in the first edition of 1550, and the same applies to the account of die-sinking. On the other hand Cellini’s notice of the Tuscan building stones, pietra serena, etc., seems like a clearer statement of what we find in Vasari’s edition of 1550. On the whole it was Cellini who used Vasari rather than Vasari Cellini, though the tracts can be regarded as practically independent. The Trattati of Cellini are really complementary to Vasari’s ‘Introductions.’

Vasari, as he says of himself, was painter and architect, while Cellini was sculptor and worker in metal. In matters like die-sinking, niello work, enamelling, and the making of medals, Cellini gives the fuller and more practical information, for these were not exactly in the province of the Aretine, while Vasari on his side gives us much information, especially on the processes of painting and on architectural subjects, for which we look in vain to Cellini.

Allowing for these differences, the two treatises agree in the general picture that they give of the artistic activity of their times, and they faithfully reflect the spirit of the High Renaissance, when the arts were made the instruments of a dazzling, even ostentatious, parade, in which decadence was unmistakeably prefigured. From this point of view, the point of view, that is, of the general artistic tone of an age, it is interesting to draw a comparison between the spirit of the treatises of Vasari and Cellini on the one side, and on the other the spirit of the earlier writings already referred to. If the former bring us into contact with the Renaissance in the heyday of its pride, the artistic tractates of Alberti, of a century before, show us the Renaissance movement in its strenuous youth, already self-conscious, but militant and disposed to work rather than to enjoy. Cennini’s Book of Art, though certainly written in the lifetime of Alberti, belongs in spirit to the previous, that is to the fourteenth, century. It reflects the life of the mediaeval guilds, when artist and craftsman were still one, and the practice of the arts proceeded on traditional lines in urban workshops where master and apprentices worked side by side on any commissions that their fellow citizens chose to bring. Lastly the Schedula of the monk Theophilus introduces us into quite a different atmosphere of art. Carrying us back for two hundred years, it shows us art cultivated in an ascetic community in independence of patrons or guilds or civic surroundings; on purely religious lines for the glory of the Almighty and the fitting adornment of His house.

This treatise by Theophilus is by far the most interesting and valuable of all those that have been named. No literary product of the middle ages is more precious, for it reflects a side of mediaeval life of which we should otherwise be imperfectly informed. Can it be possible, we ask ourselves, that men vowed to religion in its most ascetic form, who had turned their backs on the world’s vain shows and whose inward eye was to see only the mystic light of vision, could devote time and care to the minutiae of the craftsman’s technique? Such however was the fact. We cannot read the first few pages of Theophilus without recognizing that the religion of the writer was both sincere and fervent, and that such religion seemed to him to find a natural outcome in art. Art moreover with the German monk was essentially a matter of technique. From end to end of the treatise there is comparatively little about art as representative. Sculpture and painting indeed in the monastic period were not capable of embodying the ideal, so as to produce on the spectator the religious impression of a Madonna by Angelico or Raphael. The art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was decorative, and aimed at an effect of beauty with an under suggestion of symbolism. Theophilus troubles himself little about symbolism but bases everything on a knowledge of materials and processes; and in the workshop, whose homely construction and fittings he describes, we are invited to see the gold and silver and bronze, the coloured earths, the glass stained with metallic oxides, all taking shape in dainty and beautiful forms, and coming together in discreet but opulent display, till, as he phrases it, the Abbey Church which they bedeck and furnish ‘shall shine like the garden of Paradise.’ For to the mind of the pious craftsman this church is a microcosm. Creative skill has made it all beautiful within, and this is the skill of man, but it is only his in so far as man shares the nature of the Divine Artist that fashioned the vast macrocosm of the universe. Artistic knowledge and craftsmanship are a part of the original heritage of man as he was made in the image of God the creator, and to win back this heritage by patient labour and contriving is a religious duty, in the fulfilment of which the Holy Spirit will Himself give constant aid. Theophilus enumerates from St. Paul the seven gifts of the Spirit, and shows how the knowledge, the wisdom, the counsel, and the might, thus imparted to men, all find a field of exercise in the monastic workshop.

Cennino Cennini da Colle di Val d’ Elsa was not a devotee nor a man of religion, but a city tradesman and employer of labour. Art in his time had taken up its abode in the towns that were the seat of the artistic activity of the Gothic period in France and the neighbouring countries. It was there practised by laymen in secular surroundings, but as the French Cathedrals and the work of Giotto and Simone Martini testify, on religious subjects and in a spirit of piety. Some gleams of the visionary light that irradiates the workshop of Theophilus fall across the panels which Cennini and his apprentices smooth and clamp, and prime with gesso, and paint with forms of the Madonna or the Crucified. In one of his chapters he demands for the artist a chaste and almost ascetic life, as of one who studies theology or philosophy, and again he bids him clothe himself for his art with love and obedience, with patience and godly fear. When beginning a delicate piece of manipulation Cennini bids the worker ‘Invoke the name of God,’ and it is characteristic too that he tells him that such work must not be executed in haste, but ‘with great affection and care.’ In the main however, Cennini’s treatise is occupied with a description of the processes of painting traditional in the school of Florence, that was dominated throughout the fourteenth century by the commanding figure of Giotto. We learn from the Trattato how walls were plastered and prepared for the mural painter, and can measure how far the technical practice of fresco had at the time been carried. Fresco painting, on which the reader will find a Note at the close of the ‘Introduction’ to Painting, was only the revival of an art familiar to the ancients, but the best form of the technique, called by the Italians ‘buon fresco,’ was only completely recovered in the course of the fifteenth century. In the school of Giotto, represented by Cennini, the practice was as yet imperfect, but his account of it is full of interest. Painting on panels and on the vellum of books he thoroughly understands, and his notices of pigments and media convey much valuable information. Amongst other things he seems quite au fait in the practice of oil painting, which Vasari has made many generations believe was an invention of the Flemish van Eyck.

The chief importance however of Cennini for the present purpose is to be found in his implicit reliance on authority and tradition, in which he contrasts most markedly, as we shall see, with his fellow-countryman and successor, Leon Battista Alberti. Cennini had himself worked for twelve years with Agnolo Gaddi the son of Taddeo Gaddi, for twenty-four years the pupil and assistant of Giotto, and he warns the student against changing his teacher, and so becoming, as he calls it, a ‘phantasist.’ To quote his own words, ‘do thou direct thy course by this rule according to which I will instruct thee in the painter’s art, for Giotto the great master himself followed it. Four and twenty years was Taddeo Gaddi, the Florentine, his scholar; Taddeo’s son was Agnolo; Agnolo kept me by him twelve years, during which he taught me to paint in this manner,’ and he points the moral from his own experience, ‘At the earliest moment you can, put yourself under the best master you can find, and stay with him as long as you are able.’

Cennini, who seems to have been born about 1372, probably wrote his Trattato towards the close of his life, and there is MS. authority for dating the tract Della Pittura of Leon Battista Alberti about 1435, so that the two works may have been composed within the same generation. The contrast between them is however most striking. Cennini’s ideas are wholly those of the fourteenth century, when guild traditions were supreme over artistic practice; whereas Alberti is possessed by the spirit of the Early Renaissance, of which he is indeed one of the most representative figures. In his view the artist should base his life and his work on the new humanistic culture of the age, and build up his art on science and the study of nature and on the example of the masters of antiquity. With regard to the last, the reader, who hears Alberti invoking the legendary shades of Pheidias and Zeuxis and Apelles, may suspect that a new authority is being set up in place of the old and that the promised freedom for the arts is to be only in the name. It is of course true that the reliance on classical models, which came into fashion with the Revival of Learning, was destined in future times to lie like an incubus on the arts, and to give an occasion for many famous revolts; but these times were not yet, and with Alberti the appeal to antiquity is little more than a fashion of speech. At other epochs, when men have suddenly broken loose from some old-established authoritative system, they have turned to the classical world for the support which its sane and rationally based intellectual and political systems seemed to offer. It was so at the time of the French Revolution, and so it was earlier when the men of the fifteenth century were passing out from under the shadow of mediaeval authority. Alberti seems to find satisfaction in the thought of the existence of unquestionable models of perfection in those classical masters whose names were current in humanistic circles, but he makes but little practical use of them. It is remarkable indeed how little direct influence in the essentials of art was exercised over the Italian painting and sculpture of the fifteenth century by the models of the past. Classical subjects come in by the side of the more familiar religious themes, and accessories in pictures are drawn largely from antique remains, but the influence does not penetrate very deep. How little there is that is classical in the spirit and even the form of the art of Donatello! How closely we have to scan the work or the utterances of Leonardo to find a trace of the study of Roman or Hellenic antiquity!

With Alberti, as with the humanists in art in general, the watchword was ‘Nature.’ As if with direct reference to what Cennini had said about adhering to a chosen master, Alberti in the third book of his Della Pittura, derides those who follow their predecessors so closely as to copy all their errors. Equally at fault are those who work out of their own head without proper models before them. The real mistress is nature. Now ever since the beginning of the Italian revival the study of nature had been set before the artist, and Cennini bids the craftsman never to pass a day without making some drawing from a natural object. The study of nature however, with Alberti and the masters of the Early Renaissance, meant something more. The outward aspect of things was to be narrowly observed, and he instances the effect of wind on the drapery of figures, but underneath this outward aspect the artist was to explore the inner structure upon which the external appearance depends. The nude figure must be understood under the drapery, the skeleton and muscular system beneath the integument. Then nature as a whole, that is to say, figures and objects in their mutual relations, must be investigated, and this on a basis of mathematical science. Alberti has a passion for geometry, and begins his treatise with a study from this point of view of visible surfaces. The relation of the eye to visual objects, and especially the changes which these are seen to undergo in their sizes and relations according as the eye is moved, lead on to the study of perspective, on which science, as is well known, depended so much of the advance in painting in the fifteenth century. Everything in a picture is to be studied from actual persons or objects. It will add life and actuality to a historical composition if some of the heads are copied from living people who are generally known, but at the same time a common sort of realism is to be avoided, for the aim of the artist should not be mere truth to nature but beauty and dignity.

It is in his conception of the artist’s character and life that Alberti is least mediaeval. Here, in the third book of Della Pittura, we see emerging for the first time the familiar modern figure of the artist, who, as scholar and gentleman, holds a place apart from and above the artizanception inspires the interesting chapter, the tenth in the ninth book, of Alberti’s more important treatise De Re Aedificatoria, where he draws out the character of the ideal architect, who should be ‘a man of fine genius, of a great application, of the best education, of thorough experience and especially of sound sense and firm judgement.’ The Renaissance artist was indeed to fulfil the idea of a perfectible human nature, the conception of which is the best gift of humanism to the modern world. As sketched in Della Pittura, he was to be learned in all the liberal arts, familiar with the creations of the poets, accustomed to converse with rhetoricians, ‘a man and a good man and versed in all good pursuits.’ He was to attract the admiring regard of his fellows by his character and bearing, and to be marked among all for grace and courtesy, for ‘it is the aim and end of the painter to seek to win for himself through his works praise and favour and good-will, rather than riches.’ Such a one, labouring with all diligence and penetration on the study of nature and of science, would win his way to the mastery possessed by the ancient painters, and would secure to himself that fame so dear to the Italian heart!

In the hundred years that intervened between the life-courses of Alberti and of Vasari, the Renaissance artist, whom the former describes in the making, had become a finished product, and the practice of the arts was a matter of easy routine. The artistic problems at which the men of the fifteenth century had laboured so earnestly were solved; the materials had become plastic to the craftsman’s will; the forms of nature were known so well that they ceased to excite the curiosity which had set Leonardo’s keenly sensitive nature on edge. At the time Vasari wrote, with the exception of the Venetians and of Michelangelo, all the men of genius who had created the art of the Renaissance had passed away, and the busy workers whose multitudinous operations he watched and chronicled were, like himself, only epigoni—successors of the great. We have only to read Vasari’s eulogy of Michelangelo’s frescoes on the vault of the Sistine, in his Life of that master, to see how far the tone of the age in regard to art had changed from the time when Alberti was exhorting the student to work out his own artistic salvation with fear and trembling. ‘No one,’ exclaims Vasari, ‘who is a painter cares now any more to look out for novelty in inventions or attitudes or drapery, for new modes of expression, and for sublimity in all the varied effects of art; seeing that all the perfection which it is possible to give in work done in this fashion has been imparted to these figures by Michelangelo.’ The cultivation of the Michelangelesque, instead of the severe and patient study of nature, that Leonardo had called ‘the mistress of all masters,’ marks the spirit of the Florentine and Roman schools after the middle of the sixteenth century, and Vasari’s own works in fresco and oil, hastily executed and on a vast scale, but devoid alike of originality and of charm, are the most effective exponents of the ideas of his time and school. At this epoch the artist himself was no longer the dominant figure in the world of art, nor was his struggle for self-perfection in the forefront of interest for the spectator. The stage was rather commanded by the patron, the Pope Leo, the Duke Cosimo or the Cardinal Farnese of the day, at whose bidding the artist must run hither and thither, and leave one task for another, till a delicate nature like Raphael’s or Perino del Vaga’s fails under the strain, and the sublime genius of Michelangelo is thwarted in its free expression. With the exception of the Venetians, most of the more accomplished Italian masters of the period were at work on commissions set them by these wealthy patrons, who lorded it over their kind and made the arts subservient to their temporal glory. For such Vasari himself was always contentedly busy on buildings or frescoes or pageants, and for work of the kind demanded nature had exactly equipped him. He was evidently embarrassed neither by ideals nor by nerves, but was essentially business-like. Galluzzi in his History of the Grand Dukes says of him that ‘to the qualities of his profession he united a certain sagacity and alertness of spirit which gave to Duke Cosimo considerable pleasure from his company.’ He was distinguished above his fellows for the characteristic, not too common among artists, of always working to time. He might scamp his work, but he would by one method or another get it finished in accordance with his contract. His powers of application must have been of a high order, for we should remember that his literary output was by no means inconsiderable, and with his busy life the wonder is not that he wrote rather carelessly but that he was able to do any serious literary work at all.