One
Infinite Grace


The earliest literary portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, and to me still the most moving, is that by the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari in his classic book Lives of the Artists, published in 1550. (1) Vasari was only eight years old when Leonardo died, but he gathered information about the master from many artists who had known him and remembered him well, most notably Leonardo’s close friend and disciple Francesco Melzi. An acquaintance of Leonardo, the surgeon and art collector Paolo Giovio, wrote a short eulogy, but it is unfinished and merely a page long. (2) Vasari’s chapter, “Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” therefore, is as close as we can come to a contemporary account.

Besides being an accomplished painter and architect, Vasari was a keen collector of drawings by famous masters and of stories about them. The idea of writing a book on the history of Italian art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries was suggested to him by Giovio during a dinner party in Rome. (3) The book became a bestseller when it was first published, and its wide popular appeal has endured over the centuries due to the author’s lively and colorful portraits, replete with charming anecdotes. Through a series of engaging stories about the lives of its greatest artists, Vasari’s Lives conveyed the revolutionary nature of the Italian Renaissance. In spite of many inaccuracies and a tendency toward referring to legends and idolizing, Vasari’s work remains the principal source for anyone interested in that period of European art and culture.


QUALITIES AND APPEARANCE

The opening paragraphs of Vasari...