Vasari on Technique

by Giorgio Vasari

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Genres: Art, Renaissance, Nonfiction, History

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter and architect, known for his famous biographies of Italian artists.

Reviews

[Martin Ridgway]

If you've seen Vasari's Lives of the Artists, it's usually published without the technical introduction; mainly because who wants 300 pages of technical "how to" before getting into 1500 pages of the lives of the artists.
If you really want Vasari's idealised view of how to paint, sculpt, design etc, then here it is.
Here Vasari is just as biased as he is in the Lives, he's trying to elevate the practise of the arts from a manual craft to a higher status akin to poetry and literature, hence he plays down the physical and emphasises the design (conceptual) aspects. With that in mind, this is a fascinating (if slightly repetitive) read.
If you want to know what actual painters did (a bit earlier) go to Cennino Cennini's The Craftsman's Handbook (the Book of the Art) or Alberti's On Painting.

[Erin]

Vasari is great to read with a grain of salt - he provides insight into the Renaissance thoughts on techniques and materials for architecture, painting, engraving, sculpture, and drawing, however it is biased with his personal preferences and likes.

This edition leaves much to be desired though as the author's commentaries on Vasari's writing impedes the original flow of the book and should be its own book. For example, the first 100 pages are Vasari, then pages 101-142 are the author's commentaries on Vasari. This bloats the book unnecessarily and I only wanted to read Vasari, not the 1960s author.

[Mephistopheles]

This is definitely worth reading - it is a good overview of all the craft techniques in Italy at the time, though he doesn’t go in depth. His rant about Gothic architecture, however, was hilarious.

[Andrew Volpe]

1960 Edition, of the 1907 Original