In Giotto's Father Barolsky shows that Vasari's Lives is a major source for the social history of Italian Renaissance art. This book completes the author's Vasari trilogy, begun with Michelangelo's Nose and Why Mona Lisa Smiles . Giotto's Father is the first book to examine the extensive and deep theme of family in Vasari's Lives and to explain its importance in the study of the image of the family in the sixteenth century. The world of the artist's workshop was closely tied to the artist's family life. Artists ...
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In Giotto's Father Barolsky shows that Vasari's Lives is a major source for the social history of Italian Renaissance art. This book completes the author's Vasari trilogy, begun with Michelangelo's Nose and Why Mona Lisa Smiles . Giotto's Father is the first book to examine the extensive and deep theme of family in Vasari's Lives and to explain its importance in the study of the image of the family in the sixteenth century. The world of the artist's workshop was closely tied to the artist's family life. Artists were often trained by their fathers, and they sometimes married into the families of other artists. It is thus reasonable for Vasari to have viewed the community of artists as an extended family or brotherhood presided over by major patriarchal figures, for example, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Raphael. Building on the view of Vasari's work as a highly wrought, complex work of fiction, Barolsky shows how the Lives is not just a series of biographies of artists but a sustained, detailed, and highly fictionalized account of artists' families. In very nearly every biography, Vasari makes up stories of paternal blessing, of filial piety or prodigality, of noble and ignoble wives, of greedy, cruel, or violent relatives--tales that tell us a great deal about Vasari's own family in particular and about Renaissance family relations in general. Barolsky's explanation of just how deeply ideas about family inform Vasari's Lives provides a new and more complex understanding of one of the most important sources for the comprehension of the Renaissance artist. Vasari's family stories are often so fanciful that historians and art historians frequently ignore them because they seem unreliable. Barolsky compares these family tales to those told by Cellini, Michelangelo, and Bandinelli and shows that, although fictional, Vasari's stories ring true to the sentiments expressed by his contemporaries in their own fictionalized family histories. Fictions provide valuable clues to the realities that they metaphorically describe. As an extended historical fiction, Vasari's book tells us a great deal about the emotions, aspirations, and ideals of Renaissance life.
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Very Good. Very Good Dust Jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. pp. 138. 138 pp. Tightly bound. Corners not bumped. Text is free of markings. No ownership markings. Very good dust jacket. Just a hint of light foxing. This copy is smyth sewn. Smyth sewing is a method of bookbinding where groups of folded pages (referred to as signatures) are stitched together using binder thread. Each folded signature is sewn together individually with multiple stitches and then joined with other signatures to create the complete book block. This is the traditional and best method of bookbinding.
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1992 Barolsky, Paul GIOTTO'S FATHER AND THE FAMILY OF VASARI'S LIVES University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, c1992 138pp, index 8vo As new unread hardcover in as new d/j.
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New in new dust jacket. Library binding. Cloth over boards. 160 p. Audience: General/trade. Beautiful, brand new book, tight, clean, unmarked, unread. Dust jacket and book both in pristine condition.
