Vasari quincentenary: a re-evaluation of his work

2011 sees the fifth centenary of Vasari's birth. To mark the event, the Journal of Art Historiography calls for articles, documents and reviews to celebrate the event. While there has been an enormous secondary literature on Vasari, much of it has been driven by a desire to use his work to find facts about his artists. Little has been written on the overall structure of his Lives, his purposes in publication, the orality of his society and the way in which the distinctiveness of his education affected his writing. He seems to have been treated as an 'Artist' who simply cobbled together a set of lives relying on the literary intelligence of others, with their mountains of classical sources. There has been no Anglophone translation of the 1550 edition of his Lives nor any complete modern translation of his 1568 edition. No-one appears to have picked up the challenges of Michael Baxandall's Doing justice to Vasari, Times Literary Supplement, 1st February
1980, 111. The time has come to challenge the pedants and re-evaluate the man and his work.

Deadline for submissions: 1st June 2011

Professor Richard Woodfield
Editor of the Journal of Art Historiography
The University of Glasgow
http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/arthistoriography/