ABSTRACT
When Vasari published the Life of Francesco Salviati in the 1568 edition of the Lives, his friend and colleague whom he had known since childhood had been dead five years. By any measure, as both the primary sources and scholarly literature readily attest, Salviati was one of the most brilliant painters of his generation. An artist of immense facility, conceptual sophistication, and pictorial invention, Salviati worked for some of the most renowned and powerful patrons in some of the most important courtly and religious spaces in Italy. He conversed with many of the most prominent intellectuals, philosophers, and poets of his generation, had important theoretical and literary texts dedicated to him, and left a legacy in drawings, prints, and paintings that continues to be sorted out and debated by art historians. 1 Vasari’s Life of Salviati remains the most important sixteenth-century narrative source for Salviati’s life and work, and is a continual point of reference for scholars seeking to clarify events and information or fill lacunae left out by Vasari. As a narrative history however, Vasari’s Life of Salviati is revealing and highly problematizing in its complexity and suggestion—not unlike the character and personality of the artist fashioned in it. It is also arguably one of the more subtle of Vasari’s added biographies to the 1568 edition and was perhaps personally challenging for Vasari to write, as he strikes a rhetorically delicate and believably honest balance between praise, criticism, affectionate sympathy, support, and self-promotion. The dichotomy between art and artist—between Salviati’s copious, universal style (“… ricco, abondante e copiosissimo nell’invenzione di tutte le cose e universale in tutte le parti della pittura”) 2 —and his suspicious, melancholic nature (“Era Francesco di natura malinconico … Ma finalmente quella sua sì fatta natura irresolute, sospettosa e soletaria non fece danno se non a lui”), 3 forms the foundational thread for Vasari’s narrative. Implicit everywhere in Salviati’s shortcomings and failures (as Vasari describes them) are Vasari’s own accomplishments and successes, most particularly within the environment of the sixteenth-century court and its visual and social style fostered by disegno. 4 Salviati’s critical fortune in the Lives is thus tightly linked to Vasari’s own.
