Dante and the Modern Cult of the Artist

Abstract

.L/Ess than a millennium ago, circa 1300, there began to emerge in Italy, specifically in Tuscany, a new con sciousness of the artist?a development that eventually led to the publication in Florence, 250 years later, of Vasari's Lives. A monumental series of biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects from Cimabue to Michelangelo, organized to dem onstrate the overall progress of art toward perfection, Vasari's book is seen as the foundation of art history, which is part of a broader phenomenon that I wish to call the cult of the artist. The modern fame of the artist as hero in the Western world from the Renaissance masters to Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Pi casso, and Jackson Pollock, among many others, extends far beyond art history as an intellectual discipline or field of study. Such glory is closely tied to the rise of the modern art museum and its blockbuster exhibitions of artists as stars; and it is reflected in celebratory novels, stories, poetry and films about artists, which proliferate in our own day. This aggrandizement of the artist is central to what in the nineteenth century came to be called the religion of art. The el evated status of the artist, or what Vasari called the artificer, is one of the principal, distinguishing features of our own cul ture, since there were no biographies of artists before the mod ern period. In fact, the celebration of the artist is one of the many defining features of modernity or, as it is called, mod ernism. The famous, classical anecdotes about Phidias and Apelles, among other Greek artists preserved by Pliny the El der in his Natural History, are the taproots of the modern ex altation of the artist as hero. Despite the glory of such artists in these pre-biographical fables, artists remained largely anony