La vida de los artistas

The Lives of the Artists

This preface, and also his whole book, could be more interesting if Giorgio Vasari's religious basis was not present, because, actually I agree in lots of his arguments,but telling stories from the bible as prove of something, nowadays, has not sense. He starts his preface as a revision through the history of the beginning of the arts. He writes this part of thehistory very detailed and full of data. It seems that Vasari tries to convince people that do not believe in his theory. If it only was an excuse to start his book, he would not emphasize so much. Butclearly he writes every small detail from his wide knowledge to highlight his view about it. And especially, he tries to underline, the perfection of Roman sculpture and painting, based on the art of theslaves they caught during the invasions around the Mediterranian, that transformed Rome one of the prettiests city.

Otherwise, I would take this preface as an historical text, and imagining that itwas written in 1550 in the middle of the Renaissance, has by its own a great value. It is especially interesting how he writes about the decadence of the arts after the fall of the Roman Empire, andhow all this art was abandoned and buried until Renaissance days, when artists started again imitating, a very interesting world, the beauty of Nature. Imitating, this world was widely used by Platoand Aristotle when told about arts, and it is also repeated lots of times during this vasili's preface. He emphasizes also in the figure of God as the teacher of every artist, because God provided uswith the power of imitating and made us superior to the other animals.

For Vasari, the Roman art quality was lost in part by the indiference of christianity against Goths and other northernbarbarians tribes, like Ostrogoths, whose leader Totila conquered the city of Rome twice, destroying its walls and ruining all the most magnificent and noble buildings. And if this attack against Goths and...