Lives of the Artists

A courtier arrives from Rome to test the masters for a commission and asks Giotto for a drawing to prove his hand. Giotto plants his elbow at his side, turns his wrist once, and hands over a perfect circle, freehand, no compass, no correction. That is the sort of scene Giorgio Vasari builds his book from, not a catalogue of paintings but the tempers and appetites of the men who made them. He knew some of his subjects himself, and he pointed his whole history at one, Michelangelo, treated as something nearer a species of man than an artist, proof that beauty, buried since antiquity, had been reborn. Vasari named that reawakening, "rinascita," and we have used his word, the Renaissance, ever since. Read enough of these lives and painting stops looking like a wall in a museum and starts looking like the messiest, most human ambition there is, envious, boastful, and touched, every so often, by the grace that let one man draw a circle so perfect it convinced a Pope he had found God's hand inside a mortal's.