The shrinking of hoarded treasures through the return of looted art or through the correction of incorrect attributions usually proceeds rather sheepishly in museums. It is all the more remarkable what the Louvre is currently celebrating. For almost three centuries, people in Paris had been convinced that the most important ensemble of drawings owned by Giorgio Vasari that is, that personal collection of master drawings of the Italian Renaissance mentioned by Vasari in his “Künstler-Viten” and then scattered to the four winds. An exhibition now makes it clear that the Louvre’s Vasari treasure is not reduced to just a few sheets.
The “Libro de’ disegni” of this forerunner of art history, who was one of the first to compile a collection of drawings based on historical aspects, has been lost since his death in 1574. The sheets were sold or given away. However, the book continues to flourish as a myth and is considered an archetype of modern art collections. Apart from the mention of individual drawings in the “Viten”, very little is known about it. Was it five hundred sheets? The half? More? Fewer? Some collectors of the 18th century imagined that they owned considerable parts of it. One of them, the Frenchman Pierre-Jean Mariette, also believed that he had found a reliable criterion for the sheets belonging to the collection. Vasari himself or his students, he wrote in 1730, framed the drawings with hand-added ornaments and wrote the name of the respective artist underneath “in beautiful letters”.
master or not? You should have known long ago
Such drawings decorated with allegorical or architectural elements, the so-called “Montage Vasari”, circulated in large numbers. The most extensive ensemble of these came to the Louvre via Mariette, another bundle went to Sweden. Even in his early years as Louvre curator, says the curator of the current Paris exhibition, he heard murmurs about the bundle of the “Montage Vasari” with awe and pride. You should have known better a long time ago.
In a 1950 inventory of Renaissance prints in the British Museum, two art historians made a significant discovery. On a sheet with the supposed “Montage Vasari” they found an emblem that referred to a contemporary of Vasari, the then famous collector Niccolò Gaddi, who, like Vasari, had the motifs on the drawing sheets framed with pen and ink. Apparently that was a popular technique at the time. Most of the leaves supposedly from Vasari’s drawing book lost their clear classification as a result of this discovery. However, word of this has hardly gotten around in art history to this day. The joint exhibition of the Louvre and the National Museum in Stockholm, where she will be shown in the autumn, is an official departure from these museums’ claim to Vasari’s drawing treasure. Hardly more than 30 sheets can be viewed worldwide as coming from Vasari’s collection. The burden of proof has shifted. The “Montage Vasari” is no longer a reliable criterion. From now on, proof of authenticity with regard to the “Libro de’ disegni” must be provided individually for each sheet.
From now on, each sheet must be judged individually, including Giulio Clovio’s “Le Christ mort soutenu par saint Jean et pleuré par les Saintes Femmes”
(Photo: Michel Urtado/ © RMN – Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado)
Art history is certainly not upset by this, and the drawings are no less beautiful for that reason. The situation has changed, however. And new insights emerge. A closer look reveals different tendencies in the form of the picture frame. Vasari and his collaborators liked to add allegorical motifs to their frames, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio’s sheet “Head of an Old Man with Closed Eyes”, on which four female figures on the edges of the medallion irresolutely either turn towards the old man or towards him walk distance In the frames commissioned by Gaddi, on the other hand, architectural elements such as window frames, wall panels or mantelpieces dominate. The position of the collector is also interesting in the comparison. Vasari was a collecting artist, Gaddi a connoisseur and lover. Moreover, the “Libro” of the former was apparently a bound book with a fixed arrangement. That of Gaddi was in the form of an album with loose sheets to be taken out and hung alternately on the walls of the Casa dell’OrtoGaddi’s palace in Florence.
The Louvre can now only show a few drawings
Due to the revised attribution and the fragile nature of the sheets, the Louvre exhibition can boast only a few authentic drawings from Vasari’s collection. Based on the selected sheets in their context, however, one can clearly follow how simple artist’s sketches and graphic preliminary studies, provided with lush border flourishes, were made into independent works of art. Many of these subsequent ornamental additions were later cut away again. The last exhibition hall in Paris shows a series of such amputated drawing sheets, which, if at all, only contain traces of their framing. They look orphaned, but at the same time have something very modern for us today’s art viewers, who no longer need visual aids with pen and ink.
Giorgio Vasari – The Book of Drawings. Fates of a mythical collection. Louvre, Paris. Until July 18th. Catalog 29 euros