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Updated: May 20, 2025
I must not omit to qualify Vasari's praise of Luca Signorelli, by reference to a letter recently published from the Archivio Buonarroti, Lettere a Diversi, p. 391.
This statement has been combated by Morelli, but although historical evidence is wanting that the two men ever actually met, there is nothing improbable in Vasari's account.
He no doubt did see the Assumption in the Marienleben completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more formal much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The Assunta was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult to see in its position on the high altar.
It is infinitely more probable that Vasari's first statement is the more reliable viz. that Titian began to adopt Giorgione's manner about the year 1507, and it follows, therefore, that the portrait of the gentleman of the Barberigo family, if by Titian, dates from this time, and not 1495. Collection of the Earl of Darnley, Cobham Hall
The broad, masterly technique of the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's "giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey sleeve of this Ariosto, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with silver.
Vasari did not hold the art in high estimation, saying that it was practised by "those persons who possessed more patience than skill in design," and I confess to a furtive concurrence in Vasari's opinion.
I simply assure you of the fact at present; and if you work, you may have sight and sense of it. There are Greeks, and Greeks, then, in the twelfth century, differing as much from each other as vice, in all ages, must differ from virtue. But in Vasari's sight they are alike; in ours, they must be so, as far as regards our present purpose.
This answers in every respect to Vasari's eloquent description of the magna peccatrix, lovely still in her penitence. It is an embodiment of the favourite subject, infinitely finer and more moving than the much earlier Magdalen of the Pitti, in which the artist's sole preoccupation has been the alluring portraiture of exuberant feminine charms.
Seeing how important the influence of Masaccio was destined to become, I have ventured to italicise Vasari's opinions on the causes which operated in creating the Florentine style and in raising the art of painting to heights undreamt of by its earliest pioneers. THREE names stand out conspicuously from the ranks of Florentine painters in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
There was a certain fitness in Cimabue painting this Madonna, for it is said that he had his education in the convent which stood here before the present church was begun. But I should add that of Cimabue we know practically nothing, and that most of Vasari's statements have been confuted, while the painter of the S. Maria Novella Madonna is held by some authorities to be Duccio of Siena.
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