The Function of Michelangelo in Vasari’s Lives

Abstract

HOW IS MICHELANGELO presented in the biographies of other artists in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects? While Vasari’s 1550 and 1568 biographies of Michelangelo have been amply studied, less attention has been paid to the many references to the sculptor elsewhere in the Vite. References to Michelangelo in other biographies address a wide variety of subjects: artists who studied his work, Michelangelo’s evaluation of the work of other artists, his friendships and collaborations, antagonists who sought to thwart him, artists who influenced his work, and Vasari’s occasional disagreements with him. Although Vasari touches on some of these topics in the Life of Michelangelo, the individual biographies, taken together, provide a much fuller account of the rhythm of Michelangelo’s life and the nature of the artistic circles in which he moved. As this essay will demonstrate, a close examination of these references can provide considerable information about artistic practice in Renaissance Italy. The Michelangelo invoked throughout the other lives notably augments the “divino Michelagnolo” extolled in the sculptor’s own vita. Many of the stories about Michelangelo reported in other biographies are well known. My interest lies less in recalling them than in exploring the allusions as a group and showing how they contribute to the synchronic structure of the Lives. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the references to Michelangelo form a narrative, they do form a tendentious accumulation. Subjects recur and often appear in clusters over the course of two or more biographies: there may not be a