Portrait Galleries, Artists’ Biographies and the Birth of Academies and Museums

The second edition of Vasari's Vite, published in 1568, had a threefold impact, literary, historical and visual. This paper analyzes which were the cultural origins and reasons behind the selection the iconographic apparatus. How did this interact with the biographies and which were, moreover, its consequences, on a wider scene, outside the book. Moreover what kind of influence the portraits had, from the pedagogical and mnemotechnical viewpoint on the birth and arrangement of the art collections in the European Academies between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, particularly in Florence and Rome, and later in museums. The artist’s portrait played a new role since the second edition of the Vite. Highly integrated and corrected, with its 144 printed portraits, the book presented a whole gallery of historical portraits, under the personal care of Vasari. In each single case the portrait introduced the biography, followed by the description and list of the works. This was an epoch-making strategy suggesting a deeper insight into the biography of the artists and a fuller perception of their identity, even visually, as historical persons. The "torrentiniana" edition of the Vite presented, through the portraits, the prototype of the fortune of artist’s and architect’s, both as individuals and as a series. This was the starting point of a fruitful new literary and figurative genre, which crossed the Alps and reached the Flanders, France, Spain and Germany. The portrait books helped in conferring upon the artists an unprecedented dignity and social role which influenced the organization of collections of paintings and prints. By the middle of the age of the Enlightenment, the Lives of Artists books still enjoyed a broad and renewed interest. The present paper try to answer the above mentioned questions, also by investigating whether and to what extent the relationship between biography and portrait influenced the the ideas of modern museology.