ABSTRACT
For nearly five centuries, Giorgio Vasari’s account has dominated the narrative of Renaissance art with little disturbance. We now, however, recognize Vasari as not the objective narrator he might suggest, but rather a highly biased observer who glorified the art of Florence at the expense of other locations. Siena falls among the cities subject to this disregard, a city that he presents as having suffered—with only rare glimmers of success—a long period of decline following the great achievements of its early Renaissance artists. While Vasari’s prejudices have received increasing recognition, the politicized nature of his approach requires further attention. Indeed, Vasari crafted his account just as the ancient rivalry between the two great Tuscan powers reached its culmination and he revised his work once Siena came fully under Florentine control. This historical context, as well as the circumstances of Vasari’s own career, shaped his overall narrative, one that was guided as much by politics and the patronage of his own time as the actual events of the individual artists’ lives. Omissions and misrepresentations prove to riddle Vasari’s stories of even the most celebrated masters of thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Siena, thereby undermining the whole of his influential tale of Renaissance art.
