Rivals with a Common Cause: Vasari, Cellini, and the Literary Formulation of the Ideal Renaissance Artist

The well-documented personal animosity between Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini has dominated scholarship on their relationship, both as artists and authors. Their antipathy was by all accounts as intense as it could be petty, and it has to some extent been inherited by their admirers. In addition, both artists have fallen prey to easy stereotypes that appear to be fundamentally at odds—in this construct, Cellini is understood as uncouth and self-absorbed, a one-off aberrant who is perhaps most valuable as a case study on a psychiatrist’s couch, ¹ while Vasari emerges as sycophantic and pompous whose questionable value as a source is undermined by his many factual errors. ²