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Ruskin leaves the same impression as Vasari: he too makes much talk about attitudes and muscles in Michael Angelo, and seems to be on Vasari's level as to comprehending him. The difference is that Vasari praises, Ruskin blames; both miss the mark.
The conditions under which Michael Angelo worked, without a trained band of pupils, must have struck contemporaries, accustomed to Raphael's crowds of assistants, with a wonder that justified Vasari's emphatic language of exaggeration as to his single-handed labour. In speaking of the Sistine I have treated Michael Angelo as a sculptor, and it was a sculptor who designed those frescoes.
He adds, however, that many of the pieces were found about in various places, and that all of them were preserved like sacred objects. We have, then, every reason to believe that the story told in Vasari's first edition is the literal truth.
Vasari's letter to Michelangelo shows that up to this date none of the statues had been erected in their proper places, and that it was intended to add a great number of figures, as well as to adorn blank spaces in the walls with frescoes.
It fell also on the faces of the two men, not unlike in feature and colouring, but totally dissimilar in expression, and seemed to intensify every point of difference between them. There was a lofty serenity upon Dino Vasari's brow, while guilt and fear and misery were deeply imprinted on Hugo's boyish, beautiful face. For the first time the contrast between them struck forcibly on Hugo's mind.
After all, Vasari's name and fame rest principally on the labours of his pen, not those of his brush. His "Lives of the Painters," although not a model of precision in facts or chronology, is nevertheless the mine from which all subsequent art historians quarry to obtain their information.
After making due allowance for Vasari's too notorious inaccuracies, deliberate misstatements, and random jumpings at conclusions, we have the right to accept him here as a first-rate authority.
That her manners were not conciliating to the pupils is possible, perhaps their manners savoured too much of familiarity for a woman who believed in her own charms; but that she was faithless, which her biographers assert on the strength of Vasari's phrase, "that Andrea was tormented by jealousy," there is literally nothing to show.
I find Vasari's mistakes usually of this brightly blundering kind. The head entirely thrown back, he looks up with no distortion of the delicately arched brow: writing, as he gazes. For the association of the religion of the Magi with their own in the mind of the Florentines of this time, see "Before the Soldan."
It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery: nominally custodians of the museum. To repeat one of Vasari's sentences: "Some say that he never took up his brush without first making a prayer"....
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