ABSTRACT
As a major figure behind the foundation of the Florentine Academia del Disegno, it fell to Giorgio Vasari to provide the organization with the authority it needed to justify its aspiring title. In his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), he provides his response to the task by expounding a theory of the origin of design that was to prove auspicious; after all, the academy’s status relied upon the question of aesthetic origins.1 ‘It is my opinion’, he wrote, ‘that design which is the foundation of both arts [painting and sculpture] and the very soul which conceives and nourished in itself every part of the intelligence, came into full existence at the time of the origin of all things.’2 For Vasari, art possessed an integral energy that had retained something of the power of the creationary moment. It was this originary essence that enabled the artist to render the truth without mediation or veil, in turn placing the viewing subject promptly in touch with its own origins. Once the epistemological grounding of the aesthetic had provided the Academia with the authority it had sought, it was often materially reinforced with expensive displays of reverence to its power, such as those seen at the funeral obsequies of Michelangelo.3 This conception of art as a centring, self-identical, ameliorative power has remained a motif in evaluations of the Renaissance. But the extent to which Vasari’s text denotes a rigid imposition of meaning upon a recalcitrant art-practice has to be acknowledged, especially in terms of what the aesthetic means for the subject.
