Art without author. The death of Michelangelo and Vasari's 'Lives

This study challenges traditional interpretations of the role of the individual in the history of Italian Renaissance art. It argues that Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is widely regarded as a charter text of Renaissance individualism, tried to delegitimize the singular artist and foreground institutional and collective production.;Vasari and Vincenzio Borghini organized Michelangelo's funeral as a means of transferring the authority of the "divine" artist to the Accademia del Disegno, the art institution they had founded a year earlier. The funeral program presented the linear progression of individual achievements, culminating with Michelangelo, as founding the institutional art endorsed by the Medicean regime. The second edition of the Lives consistently reiterates this idea. In describing Michelangelo's art, Vasari established an absolute identification between the artist and his work. By contrast, Vasari described works of art representative of an institutional conception of art, as independent and self-referential entities. The description of the unfinished dome of St. Peter, designed by Michelangelo but completed by the new generation of artists, shows how the interplay between the two modes foregrounds institutional values.;A close examination of the material and editorial aspects of the Lives further clarifies the institutional aim of the edition. Multiple authorial agencies, typographical oddities, and the modern editorial history of the Lives obscured original authorial intentions and the increasing sense of the limitations imposed by the biographical structure of the book. Vasari's original intention was evidently to place the section dedicated to the academicians directly after the biography of Michelangelo as a way of emphasizing a direct succession from the master to the institution.;This study contextualizes Vasari's project examining its effects on contemporary artistic production. Vasari designed the Sforza Almeni palace facade decoration in opposition to contemporary Florentine imitations of Michelangelo's style. This decoration exemplified a linguistic conception of art as apposed to an individual-based aesthetic. Vasari's artistic production and the intellectual agenda of the Lives are related to the subordination of literature to language, as set forth by the Florentine intellectuals within the questione della lingua. My project responds in positive terms to the central question posed by the Lives, "What after Michelangelo?" If an art based on outstanding authors and works cannot but decline after Michelangelo, an art based on conventional and collective values overcomes individual limitations to enable progress, albeit of a deliberately impersonal kind.