The sculptors surpassed the painters in Cosimo’s galaxy and regard. Ridolfo Ghirlandaio strove but failed to maintain his father’s excellence; we may sample him from his portrait of Lucrezia Summaria in Washington. Francesco Ubertini, nicknamed il Bachiacca, liked to paint historical scenes in great detail on a small scale. Iacopo Carrucci, called Pontormo from his birthplace, had every advantage and a good start; he received instruction from Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto; and at nineteen (1513) he stirred the art world with a painting, now lost, that aroused the admiration of Michelangelo and was pronounced by Vasari “the finest fresco ever seen till then.”33 But soon afterward, to the disgust of the Italians, Pontormo fell in love with the engravings of Durer, abandoned the smooth lines and harmonies of the Italian style, preferred crude and heavy Germanic forms, and pictured men and women in poses of physical or mental disturbance. In frescoes at the Certosa outside Florence Pontormo painted in this Teutonic style scenes from the passion of Christ. Vasari resented this imitation: “Was not Pontormo aware that Germans and Flemings come to learn the Italian style, which he made such effort to shake off as if it were bad?”34 Even so, Vasari confessed the power of these frescoes. Pontormo further complicated his art by developing phobias. He never allowed death to be mentioned in his presence; he avoided feasts and crowds, lest he be crushed to death; though himself kind and gentle, he distrusted nearly everyone except his beloved pupil Bronzino. More and more he courted solitude, until he formed the habit of sleeping in an upper-story room reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up after him. On his final assignment—to fresco the main chapel of San Lorenzo—he worked for eleven years in isolation, boarding up the chapel and allowing none but himself to enter. He died (1556) before finishing the task; and when the frescoes were unveiled it was seen that the figures were badly disproportioned, the faces excited or melancholy. Let us remember him by a work of his saner maturity, the lovely portrait of Ugolino Martelli now in Washington—soft feathered hat, pensive eyes, luminous raiment, immaculate hands.
Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, renamed Bronzino, distinguished himself by a remarkable series of portraits, chiefly of the Medici. The Medici Palace contains a gallery of them, from Cosimo Pater Patriae to Duke Cosimo; and if we may judge from the pouchy face of his Leo X, they were often truthful. The best of them is of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Uffizi) —a veritable Napoleon before Bonaparte—handsome, proud, and breathing fire.
Probably Duke Cosimo’s favorite artist was the man to whom this and every book on the Italian Renaissance owes half its life—Giorgio Vasari. The family into which he was born at Arezzo already included several artists; he was distantly related to Luca Signorelli, and he has told us how the old painter, seeing Giorgio’s boyhood drawings, encouraged him in studying design. In one of those innumerable acts of magnanimous and clairvoyant patronage that should be considered in judging the morals of the Renaissance, Cardinal Passerini, who had been appointed guardian of Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici, took Giorgio to Florence; and there the lad of twelve shared the studies of the young heirs to wealth and power. He became a pupil of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, and to the end of his life he revered Buonarroti—broken nose and all—as a god.
When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1527, Giorgio returned to Arezzo. At eighteen, his father having died of plague, he found himself the chief support of his three sisters and two young brothers. Again kindness rescued him. His former fellow pupil, Ippolito de’ Medici, invited him to Rome, where for three years Vasari sedulously studied ancient and Renaissance art; and in 1530 Alessandro, master of Florence after another restoration, called him to live and paint in the Palazzo Medici. There he made portraits of the family, including Lorenzo the Magnificent in a somber study, and the vivacious young Caterina—posing and opposing at whim, as if already conscious that she would be queen of France. When Alessandro was assassinated Vasari wandered for some time patronless. His paintings are rudely dealt with by modern critics, but they must have earned him some repute, for at Mantua he was housed by Giulio Romano, and at Venice Aretino was his burly chaperone. Wherever he went he carefully studied the local art, talked with artists or their descendants, collected drawings and made notes. Back in Rome, he painted for Bindo Altoviti a Deposition from the Cross, which, he tells us, “had the good fortune not to displease the greatest sculptor, painter, and architect that ever lived in our time.”
It was this Michelangelo who introduced him to the second Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; and it was this cultivated prelate who, in 1546, suggested to Vasari that he should compose for the guidance of posterity the lives of the artists who had so distinguished the Italy of the preceding two hundred years. While busily serving as painter and architect in Rome, Rimini, Ravenna, Arezzo, and Florence, Giorgio devoted part of his time to the unremunerative labor of the Lives, “moved by love for these our artists.” In 1550 he published the first edition of these Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, ed architetti Italiani, with an eloquent dedication to Duke Cosimo.
From 1555 to 1572 he was Cosimo’s chief artist. He remodeled the interior of the Palazzo Vecchio and decorated many of its walls with paintings more immense than magnificent; he raised the vast administration building known from its governmental offices as the Uffizi, and now one of the great art galleries of the world. He led in completing the Laurentian Library, and he constructed the enclosed corridor that enabled Cosimo to pass under cover from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi across the Ponte Vecchio to the new ducal residence in the Pitti Palace. In 1567 he spent several months in travel and research, and a year later he brought out a new and much enlarged edition of the Lives. He died in Florence in 1574, and was buried with his ancestors in Arezzo.
He was not a great artist but he was a good man, an industrious investigator, and (barring a few bites at Bandinelli) a generous as well as intelligent critic. In simple, racy, almost colloquial Tuscan, and occasionally with the vividness of the novelle, he gave us one of the most interesting books of all time, from which a thousand other volumes have been cribbed. It is rich in inaccuracies, anachronisms, and contradictions, but richer still in fascinating information and judicious interpretation. It did for the artists of Renaissance Italy what Plutarch had done for the martial or civic heroes of Greece and Rome. It will remain for centuries to come one of the classics of the world’s literature.