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Updated: May 20, 2025
In any case, in Vasari's text the evidence is two to one in favour of 1489-90 as the right date, and thus we come to the agreeable conclusion that our two oldest authorities, Dolce and Vasari, are at one in fixing Titian's birth between 1488 and 1490 in other words, about 1489.
Vasari's story of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it than any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the serious work of a man, but the experiment of a child.
He there appears as a young man with large and decidedly handsome features, a great shock of dark curled hair escaping from a yellow cap, and flowing down over a rich mantle which drapes his shoulders. If we may trust Vasari, he showed his curious humours freely to the monks. In spite of Vasari's malevolence, the portrait he has given us of Bazzi has so far nothing unpleasant about it.
It has often been said, and is no doubt taken from Vasari's book, that in the Borgia Apartment Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI adoring the Virgin represented under the likeness of his beloved, Julia Farnese. The critic must have been confused, because none of these madonnas recalls the face of Giulia la bella, whom people used to call the Bride of Christ.
"Seas shall waste, the skies to smoke decay, Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away." Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo; Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects; Duppa's Life of Michael Angelo; Bayle's Histoire de la Peinture en Italie. Among great benefactors, Martin Luther is one of the most illustrious. He headed the Protestant Reformation.
Anyone conversant with Vasari's inaccuracies will hardly be surprised to find that this statement is dismissed by all Titian's biographers as manifestly a mistake. Moreover, it is inconsistent with the two passages just quoted, and either they are wrong or 1480 is a misprint for 1489.
Perugino will always remain a problem to the psychologist who believes in physiognomy, as well as to the student of the passionate times in which he lived. His hard unsympathetic features in the portraits at Perugia and Florence do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari's tales about his sordid soul.
In this instance, as it happens, there is no reason to question the modern catalogue, though that is by no means the same thing as denying that Cimabue painted the picture which existed in the church of S. Cecilia in Vasari's time.
It is amusing to read Vasari's patronizing account of Tafi; from the late Renaissance point of view, the mosaic worker seemed to be a barbarous Goth at best: "The good fortune of Andrea was really great," says Vasari, "to be born in an age which, doing all things in the rudest manner, could value so highly the works of an artist who really merited so little, not to say nothing!"
But sufficient stress is not laid, I think, upon the masterly achievement of the earlier times; the tendency is to refer too much to later years, and not recognise sufficiently the prodigious precocity before 1500. One is tempted at times to question the accuracy of Vasari's statement that Giorgione died in his thirty-fourth year, which throws his birth back only to 1477.
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