Lives of Artists

 

I bought Vasari's Lives of Artists (Part 1) in Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights way back in 2012. I bought this particular book because I had stayed a week in Penang interviewing 3 CEOs a day for a special pullout for the 40th anniversary of Penang's electrical and electronics sector and had brought along How to think like Leonardo da Vinci for night time reading. In that book, the author mentioned Vasari's book several times and urged readers to get a copy.

So all fired up, naturally, I picked up this book when I saw it. I nearly got Part 2 as well, but thought, no wait, I will get Part 2 when I finished Part 1. And since it has taken me all of eight years to finish Part 1, I would say that was good thinking.

I made many false starts and then I would lose interest, not being able to push myself to read further, and then I would put it back on the shelf. And take it out to try again. And put it back on the shelf and forget about it.

Then last year, I was determined to read it through. I had bought the Walter Isaacson biography of Leonardo da Vinci and didn't want to read it before I had finished the Lives of Artists. So I set to again, determined to read at least one chapter a day (I failed miserably here) but by the end of last year, I didn't have many chapters left to go. I could do it. For sure.

Some of the biographies were interesting. You realise that the Renaissance happened when there was the plague and political turmoil. That the artists of the Renaissance took their cue from the ancients, studying ancient Greek and Roman sculpture that had been excavated. That they studied mathematics and perspective and architecture as well and some of them (OK one, maybe two - Brunelleschi and Michelangelo) were extremely good architects, who probably can't even be matched today.

Some biographies were titillating enough for you to want to find a whole book dedicated to these artists. Not Leonardo's though. I thought Vasari (who favoured Michelangelo and there was tension and rivalry between the two great artists) did a crappy job with the Leonardo biography while the Michelangelo one went on for more than 100 pages, a book in itself.

A lot of times, the biographies were merely catalogues of the paintings or other artistic works done (like the section on Titian of Cadore).

I found it difficult to read this book but I'm glad to say that I have finally finished it.

Not bad, 2021. This at least, is an achievement.