AREZZO, GIORGIO VASARI & REPUBLIC OF FLORENCE

Tina Picotes visits Arezzo, Tuscany

Today, Tina Picotes and her friends have visited Arezzo, a beautiful Tuscan city well-known by being the birthplace of Giorgio Vasari, one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

Tina loves Art and she is very interested in knowing more things about this author who invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori.

Arezzo is a city and comune in Tuscany and the capital of the province of the same name located in Tuscany.

Described by Livy as one of the Capitae Etruriae, Etruscan capitals, Arezzo or Aritim in Etruscan, is believed to have been one of the twelve most important Etruscan cities—the so-called Dodecapolis, part of the Etruscan League. Etruscan remains establish that the acropolis of San Cornelio, a small hill next to that of San Donatus, was occupied and fortified in the Etruscan period.

Conquered by the Romans in 311 BC, Arretium became a military station on the via Cassia, the road by which Rome expanded into the basin of the Po. The old Etruscan aristocracy was not extinguished: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, whose name has become eponymous with patron of the arts, came of the noble Aretine Etruscan stock.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon visits Arezzo, Tuscany

The city continued to flourish as Arretium Vetus, the third-largest city during the Augustan period, well known for its widely-exported pottery manufactures, the characteristic moulded and glazed Arretine ware, bucchero-ware of dark clay and red-painted vases, the so-called coral vases.

In the 3rd to 4th century Arezzo became an episcopal seat: it is one of the few cities whose succession of bishops are known by name without interruption to the present day, in part because the bishops operated as the feudal lords of the city in the Middle Ages.

The Roman city was demolished, partly in the course of the Gothic War and of the late-6th-century invasion of the Lombards, partly dismantled, as elsewhere throughout Europe. The Aretines re-used the stones for fortifications. Only the amphitheater remained.

The commune of Arezzo threw off the control of its bishop in 1098 and functioned as an independent city-state until 1384. Generally Ghibelline in tendency, it opposed Guelph Florence. In 1252 the city founded its university, the Studium.

More information: Visit Tuscany

Arezzo yielded to Florentine domination in 1384; its individual history became subsumed in that of Florence and of the Medicean Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During this period Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492) worked in the church of San Francesco di Arezzo producing the splendid frescoes, recently restored, which are Arezzo's most famous works. Afterwards the city began an economical and cultural decay, which ensured the preservation of its medieval centre.

In the 18th century the neighbouring marshes of the Val di Chiana, south of Arezzo, were drained and the region became less malarial. At the end of the-century French troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Arezzo, but the city soon turned (1799-1800) into a resistance base against the invaders with the Viva Maria movement, winning the city the role of provincial capital. In 1860 Arezzo became part of the Kingdom of Italy.

Visiting Arezzo, Tuscany

City buildings suffered heavy damage during World War II; the Germans made a stand in front of Arezzo early in July 1944 and fierce fighting ensued before the British 6th Armoured Division, assisted by New Zealand troops of the 2nd New Zealand Division, liberated the town 16 July 1944. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Arezzo War Cemetery, where 1,266 men are buried, is located to the north-west of the city.

Arezzo is set on a steep hill rising from the floodplain of the River Arno. In the upper part of the town are the cathedral, the town hall and the Fortezza Medicea, from which the main streets branch off towards the lower part as far as the gates. The upper part of the town maintains its medieval appearance despite the addition of later structures.

Arezzo's city proper is near the high risk areas for earthquakes, but located in a transitional area where the risk for severe earthquakes is much lower than in nearby Umbria and Abruzzo, albeit it is slightly more vulnerable than Florence.

Arezzo has a starring role in Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1997). It is the place in which the main characters live before they are shipped off to a Nazi concentration camp.

More information: Discover Tuscany

Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511-27 June 1574) was an Tuscan painter, architect, writer, and historian, most famous today for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

Vasari was born on 30 July 1511 in Arezzo, Tuscany. Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass.

Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo, where his humanist education was encouraged. He was befriended by Michelangelo, whose painting style would influence his own. He died on 27 June 1574 in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, aged 62.

Giorgio Vasari

In 1529, he visited Rome where he studied the works of Raphael and other artists of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards.

In 1547 he completed the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes that received the name Sala dei Cento Giorni. He was consistently employed by members of the Medici family in Florence and Rome, and worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places.

Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, and the frescoes begun by him inside the vast cupola of the Duomo were completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci.

He also helped to organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio. In Rome he painted frescos in the Sala Regia.

More information: Florence Inferno

Aside from his career as a painter, Vasari was also successful as an architect. His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment.

In Florence, Vasari also built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings. It was once the home of the Mercado de Vecchio.

Le Vite by Giorgio Vasari

He also renovated the medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. At both he removed the original rood screen and loft, and remodelled the retro-choirs in the Mannerist taste of his time. In Santa Croce, he was responsible for the painting of The Adoration of the Magi which was commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567.

In 1562 Vasari built the octagonal dome on the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of high Renaissance architecture.

Often called the first art historian, Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori in English Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, which was first published in 1550.

He was the first to use the term Renaissance, Rinascita, in print, though an awareness of the ongoing rebirth in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti, and he was responsible for our use of the term Gothic Art, though he only used the word Goth which he associated with the barbaric German style. The Lives also included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. The book was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists, some conjectural.

Vasari enjoyed high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. In 1547, he built himself a fine house in Arezzo, now a museum honouring him, and decorated its walls and vaults with paintings. He was elected to the municipal council of his native town, and finally rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere. He was made Knight of the Golden Spur by the Pope. He married Niccolosa Bacci, a member of one the richest and most prominent families of Arezzo.

In 1563, he helped found the Florentine Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution and 36 artists chosen as members.

Download Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

 Art owes its origin to Nature herself... 

this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, 

while the original teacher was that divine 

intelligence which has not only made us superior 

to the other animals, but like God Himself, 

if I may venture to say it.

Giorgio Vasari