Along with teaching and thinking about character and conduct, as well as instructing us on how to interact with the cultural elite in the context of applying an art as a form of specialized knowledge, some of these discourses are both reflective and instructive of burgeoning aesthetic values and address what we might broadly call, partly in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “taste.” Consider in this context Vasari’s monumental Le vite, which offers us not only a host of exemplary biographies of visual artists, replete with colorful tales about their sometimes fascinating personalities, along with abundant information—both accurate and erroneous—about the products of their labors, but also a lengthy introductory section, expanded in the second edition, on highly technical matters related to the three principal arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. As a result, when we come to Le vite we readily presume, on the one hand, that many of the rules that define the art of the painter, sculptor, and architect—the very same rules that define a knowledge about and rational ability to represent a variety of concepts, such as grace, harmony, sweetness, and urbanity—spoke to desirable qualities that constituted part of the shared vocabulary aimed at describing and evaluating visual art in the period. Hence Vasari’s Le vite can be taken, as it so often is, as a document that reflects a broad-based horizon of expectations. In part it provides us retrospectively with an understanding of what constituted the period eye of the Italian Renaissance.74 Consequently, as scholars we regularly consult Le vite to get an historicized understanding of how some people collectively viewed visual art at the time and thereby learn some of the critical terms they applied to it as the product of a supremely rational techne.
On the other hand, when we come to Vasari’s Le vite, we can also envision it as a book of instruction that taught readers of the period how to appreciate visual art so that they might better know what they, as nonpractitioners, should value when they looked at visual art, unpacked its formal construction, and situated artifacts in a broader historical development. In this regard, Vasari was not just defining accepted rules of a certain community related to a particular art as a form of specialized knowledge worthy of respect. He was also consciously fashioning how we, as potential viewers and consumers, are expected to make careful distinctions, thereby teaching us what to look for in assessing whether a painter, sculptor, or architect is indeed “excellent” in his art—if he knows the rules of the art, if he adheres to them too slavishly, or if he transcends them by liberating himself from those very same rules through years of rigorous training. In this respect, Le vite is an edifying book about the very discipline of looking at visual art. It not only trains readers to understand how art is made in the introductory section, thereby reminding us all the more emphatically that the author is indeed a broadly trained artisan fully qualified to talk about the matters at hand—that he has, in rhetorical terms, ethos in the context of his profession and the art underpinning it as a form of specialized knowledge. Vasari’s Le vite also trains its readers to value certain kinds of visual art and, what is more, certain trends in art. And in this respect Le vite taught its readers and potential consumers in the sixteenth century—and thus teaches us today—“taste.” Read Vasari, for instance, and you are led to privilege Florentine and Tuscan art over other “regional” forms of art, as well as, of course, “disegno” (“design” understood as primarily an intellectual practice realized through diligent preparatory drawing before actually applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for hard, defined edges) over “colorito” (“design” understood as more of an intuitive practice realized through coloring as a way of creating forms in the act of applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for soft, blurry edges). Those visual distinctions mattered to Vasari, presumably they mattered to his readers in search of marking themselves with distinction and in search of understanding visual art, and they still matter to us now—or at least the “us” that makes up an ever-dwindling community of readers still interested in Vasari and the Italian Renaissance.75
Moreover, within the context of thinking about Le vite as a book that edifies by performing for its readers a discipline of looking, Le vite offers us—and offered its readers over four centuries ago—two very different but still interrelated master narratives about the development of visual art in the context of the arts themselves as forms of specialized knowledge.76 One narrative—the narrative we have all grown most accustomed to over the years—is fundamentally heroic in nature. It is grounded in the achievements of primarily exceptional Florentine and Tuscan artists over time, from Cimabue to Giotto to Masaccio to Leonardo and the like. These heroic individuals within Vasari’s discourse gradually uncover, disclose, and make use of the universal rules underpinning the knowledge that makes up their art. That core master narrative, familiar to anyone who has read through even an anthologized version of Le vite, has its ultimate flowering in Michelangelo, particularly in the first Torrentiniana edition of 1550 but also still very much so in the enlarged Giuntina edition of 1568. In this regard, it is crucial that Michelangelo, the telos of this heroic narrative and providential process of artistic awakening, is viewed as inimitable so that his achievements are not readily transferable and always remain historically specific to his hand, his particular, individual, awe-inspiring terribilità, most divine nature, and enviable talent.77 Another core narrative, by contrast, is fundamentally institutional in spirit. It is grounded, as Marco Ruffini has perceptively observed, in a corporate structure of artistic production that goes all the way back to the medieval guild system, finds expression in such exemplary artists as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, and Raphael with their extensive workshops, and has its great flowering in the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Design), of which Vasari was such a vital and inspirational participant. The climax of one master narrative of historical artistic development—the heroic life work of the individual Michelangelo at the service of single patrons—in fact prepares for the upswing of the other—the rise of institutional visual art produced by an impersonal collectivity at the service of a bureaucratic “state.”78 Hence Michelangelo becomes an even more exceptional figure for Vasari within Le vite as these two master narratives—one valuing and privileging individuals, the other valuing and privileging collectivities—strategically dovetail at the end. Accordingly, Michelangelo is viewed not only as the heroic master of the three major visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as Vasari makes plain, but also as the mythical foundational hero whose providential and timely death, mourned in an elaborate funeral staged by the Accademia, makes possible the new professionalizing corporate structure of visual art of Vasari’s time—an impersonal, discipline-bound, transhistorical, and rigorously rule-governed art that will be fashioned by and through an academy, so much so that it will become, as Ruffini has elegantly phrased it, “an art without an author.”
Read this way, Le vite is not just about promoting rules for a certain type of visual art based on a form of specialized knowledge that Vasari values and seeks to elevate socially as an accomplished practitioner. Nor is it just about promoting a discipline of looking at works of visual art and understanding how they are skillfully made. Nor is it just about promoting a particular group of exemplary artists, or about promoting primarily Florentine and Tuscan artists. Nor is it just about promoting the author as a learned practitioner with a thorough command of his art within a book that ineluctably comes off as a self-reflexive ego document in the very moment that it talks primarily about other people’s lives. Nor is it just a book about promoting a heroic conception of the development of visual art with individual artists contributing to the punctuated evolution of the artist’s craft presented as possessing a form of specialized knowledge. Nor even, as I have argued elsewhere, is it just a book about promoting rules of behavior for artists (and allowing for exceptions to those rules for exceptional artists) in a period so feverishly committed to codifying conduct and civility yet so clearly peopled by larger-than-life, aggressive male personalities from Cesare Borgia to Julius II. Le vite, as Ruffini has brilliantly demonstrated, is also very much about promoting an institutional approach to an art and, as a result, a certain institutionalizing of taste as a marker of distinction. This strategy of shaping what