The Lives of the Artists

"To begin with, I think it’s impossible to be the biographer of an artist without thinking of Vasari as your crucial precedent. That’s really where the biography of Western artists begins. With Vasari, we begin thinking that artistic biography might matter. As much as we may want to resist the notion that biography is central to understanding art, it seems as though it is just inevitable – the life of the artist is an inevitable element in considering the art itself, as Vasari realised early on. More importantly, I think that the ideas that Vasari sets forward are vital to Warhol’s own notions about art. The idea, for example, that art progresses from one innovator to the next. Or that the competition between an artist and the Masters who came before him, as well as with the peers around him, is central to what making art is all about. “He was self-conscious about wanting to be better than artists of the past” These are notions that for me are absolutely essential to understanding Andy Warhol. When I argue that he’s not an idiot savant or a holy fool, one of the things I stress in my book is that he was very self-conscious—in a classically modernist way—about wanting to move art forward, whatever that might mean. He was self-conscious about wanting to be better than artists of the past, or at least very different from them. Vasari is to a large extent the source of this modernist notion of art as innovation. And that, I think, is the single most important driving force for Andy Warhol. The notion of being an innovator is absolutely what drives him again and again to do some of his most wonderful but also some of his very weirdest art. Warhol was absolutely aware of the notion of the artist with a workshop, and of its precedents. He mentions Michelangelo as a business man in an interview, and would use such notions as a defense against people who complained about him not being a master of “the hand,” as it were. It is unquestionably a tradition that Warhol was aware of being part of, and it mattered to him greatly. He wanted to be one of Vasari’s subjects – to feature in a posthumous volume of The Lives of the Artists , you might say! Vasari also championed the model of the artist who is engaged in the world as a more or less normal person – as someone who’s interacting with the culture around them, not a freak on the margins of society. Vasari’s picture of art history, and of artists and how they inhabit the world, are all very much part of how I understand Warhol as well."

"I chose Vasari because, to some extent, he invented art history as we know it. He wrote Lives of the Artists , and the first edition was published in 1550. It’s a collection of lives that are not randomly chosen. They are put together in a teleology, a sense of progressive development. The first ones are ‘i primi lumi’—Cimabue and Giotto and so on. They are the ‘first lights’ who took Italy out of the medieval—what they call maniera greca or Greek style of Byzantine painting—into something that reflects human experience. If you paint a tree, you don’t paint a platonic tree; you paint a tree you can identify, its species etc. You paint what people look like. You rediscover the art of portraiture. You create a curvilinear perspective: a three dimensional scene on a two dimensional plane. “He [Varsari] invented art history as we know it” These then develop and he works forward in these three divisions towards the ultimate fulfilment and that is Michelangelo. Michelangelo has finally done it. He has achieved it. And that’s why he refers to him as ‘il divino’—the divine one—because he has almost got the power of creation in a Biblical or a platonic sense. He’s the demiurge, the figure that can create beauty and perfection out of anything that you give him. He was also Florentine, as was Vasari. Well, Vasari was born in Arezzo. He treats non-Florentines either shabbily or superficially. He had real trouble with Raphael though because he knows how fantastic and wonderful Raphael was. He was able to get away with it because Raphael, in fact, spent some time in Florence. Vasari is a Florentine particularist. He also believed that art is not only genius, but also technique. He was the one who convinced Cosimo de’Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to found the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1563—which still exists—to train artists. And to train them how to draw. That Florentine obsession with ‘disegno’ or composition is part of Vasari’s definition of what constitutes perfect art and beauty: the ability to create a design, a composition, that will be intellectually, visually, culturally, and spiritually fulfilling. That’s why he loves Michelangelo, because Michelangelo did all of those things. Yes. I don’t want to say he was entirely a second-rater. He was not of the quality of Raphael or Michelangelo, but he was a good artist. What he did, like Guicciardini, fulfilled the terms of his contract with his employers. Sometimes it’s almost laughable. You go into the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The ceiling is the apotheosis of Cosimo I. That’s really weird, in itself, but it was required. “Much of what we know, especially about the personal lives of the artists, comes from Vasari because there are no other sources” He was an architect. He designed the Uffizi, one of the buildings that is now the art gallery, so that Cosimo could keep an eye on his bureaucrats. He worked for the Pope and did some remarkable things in Rome. He was a jack-of-all-trades. We might call him an engaged minister of culture for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. As a bureaucrat, he was able to deliver. That’s why I separated him from Cellini because Cellini is very different. Vasari worked within the system. He took advantage of his patrons, he took advantage of the opportunities that he had, and he tried to expand them by founding the Accademia del Disegno. Much of what we know, especially about the personal lives of the artists, comes from Vasari because there are no other sources. He got it from gossip and hearsay. That is how he did much of his research: by asking people who knew them or by asking somebody whose father had worked with them. Was it true? Well, it was what other people believed to be true. There are hundreds of examples where modern scholarship has shown that Vasari was wrong. But this is what he was told. And, of course, nothing is ever all true because it has to be filtered through the eyes of the historian or the art historian, and we are all flawed observers. No, he was standing. The old film The Agony and The Ecstasy is completely wrong, he didn’t lie on his back. Michelangelo had terrible personal hygiene. And, for the rest of his life, he had a sore neck, and wasn’t able to have full rotation, because of spending three years, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, like this. Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564 and the Pope wanted him buried in Rome. But while the body was being displayed at the Santi Apostoli, agents of Michelangelo’s nephew stole the body and quickly took it to Florence. There was a great state funeral and he’s buried in Santa Croce, in a tomb designed by Vasari. “Michelangelo had terrible personal hygiene. And, for the rest of his life, he had a sore neck” So there is a sense, then, of perfect fulfilment. Vasari was of course alive and a contemporary of the old Michelangelo. It’s nice to believe that you live in an age of perfection and that, finally, the divine has been achieved."