ABSTRACT
Frederic Leighton’s sumptuously decorated house and studio in London’s Holland Park, built between 1864 and 1866 at a time when, as one modern commentator observes, the painter “was only 34 years old and already earning enough to live like a Renaissance prince,” reopened in April 2010 following a major refurbishment. 1 Several reviewers of the inaugural exhibition, which brought together in the immaculately restored interior of Leighton House many of the artworks originally displayed there by the artist in his lifetime but dispersed upon his death, draw comparisons with the Renaissance. The house in its heyday, observes Kathryn Hughes, “had more in common with the great artists’ homes of renaissance Italy than … a west-London self-build.” 2 Leighton’s house certainly invites comparison with the house that Giorgio Vasari created for himself and his collection in his birthplace, Arezzo, three centuries earlier. 3 There, between 1542 and 1548, Vasari was personally responsible for the dense pictorial decoration of a private residence which celebrates in the self-commemorative iconography of every wall and ceiling vault the honorable artistic calling of its owner, much as the Victorian celebrity painter and future President of the Royal Academy devised his own “private palace of art” that symbolically expressed his identity as a gentleman artist and collector, and provided a performative space in which “he could act out the newly dignified role of artist.” 4 Indeed, three hundred years after Vasari worked among the great Renaissance painters in Florence and memorialized them in Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1550), he may be said to have played a surprisingly prominent part in defining that role. In the case of Leighton’s own career, the subjects of several of the early paintings that brought him fame and fortune were taken from Vasari, and reiterated Vasarian ideas about the progress of art that not only shaped the popular understanding and appreciation of Renaissance culture in the middle of the nineteenth century but were still extremely influential in Victorian art education, criticism, patronage, and policy. This chapter will explore Vasari’s impact on the historiography of the Renaissance and the canon of Italian Renaissance art in the nineteenth century, and how this shaped Victorian academic art. It will also consider how Vasari’s choice of biography as the medium for his history of Renaissance art chimed with the Victorians’ own passion for life writing, the lives of artists not least, and think about his legacy in relation to forms of artistic [self] representation in the long nineteenth century.
