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Emil Nolde - Mistress and Stranger

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Portraits spanning almost seventy years
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/lucian-freud-self-portraits

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Bill + Audrey Wilder, Los Angeles, April 1982 1982 composit polaroid, 46 x 44"

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Monet
1881- Alice Hoschedé

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Vissoie St. Niklaus 2013

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Paul Gauguin,

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Documentation I
Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974

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The representation of labour in feminism, and questions of maternal subjectivity.

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Mary Kelly – 'Everything Seemed to Be a First' | TateShots

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Infinity Mirrored Room, 2018
Victoria Miro

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Pouce, 1965. Musée d'Art contemporain, Marseille.

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The light at the end. 1989. 166 x 162.5 x 5 cm. From 'the entire world as a foreign land'.

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The Basket of Apples. 1895. 65cmx80cm. Oil. Art Institute of Chicago.

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Einhorn, 1970

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Einhorn, drawing 1968-69

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Portrait of Jean Alexandre , seated nude, 1909 Modigliani

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Portrait of Jean Alexandre , seated nude, 1909 Modigliani

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BBC piece about Loving Vincent, the world’s first fully painted feature film,

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BBC piece about Loving Vincent, the world’s first fully painted feature film,

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Douglas Gordon - Black Spot Catalogue - Tate Liverpool 2000

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Water Lily Pond 1918
131x88cm oil/canvas
Private Collection

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His magnum opus, "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," was published in 1550, when Vasari was in his late 30s. It offers a group portrait of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, starting with Cimabue in the 13th century and culminating 300 years later with Michelangelo, who was Vasari's oft-declared favorite and also his friend. Once, in an act of biographical overtime, Vasari braved a crowd of anti-Medici rioters to rescue an arm of Michelangelo's statue "David," which lay broken on the ground in three pieces, the casualty of a hurled bench.

Or so Vasari recounts in his "Lives." He was capable of narrative embellishment when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic. Rowland and Charney are fully cognizant of his flaws. They acknowledge that "much of his information is wrong, sometimes by his own deliberate choice." They bemoan his frequent use of unnamed sources. One of his favorite phrases was scrivono alcuni, which means "some write." Who was "some"? They must have had Deep Throats in the Renaissance, too.

Astoundingly, as Rowland and Charney make clear, no one before Vasari had written a series of artist biographies. There were lives of poets, lives of philosophers; there were rollicking lives of depraved rulers of the Roman Empire. But those subjects belonged to the upper classes. Artists, by contrast, were regarded in much the same way as cobblers or blacksmiths - manually skilled but with limited formal education, mainly because their learning took place from an early age in bustling workshops.

Vasari, on the other hand, had studied Latin in his youth and could recite passages of Virgil from memory. He was uncharacteristically literate for his time and superbly qualified to write his "Lives." If some of his stories are hyperbolic, and he did like to gush, he should be credited for having elevated the prestige of both artists and art. His achievement was to show how a work of art, unlike a cobbler's boot, is not just the product of manual dexterity but of a singular personality that imposes its own sensibility and rules. Among his best-known anecdotes is that of Giotto, who in 1304 won an important commission in Rome by demonstrating his skill in less than one minute. He painted a perfect O in red without moving his arms or using a compass. Apparently, he just rotated his hand, in a gesture of stunning conceptual elegance.

What do we know of Vasari's own origins? He was descended from generations of potters, and the name Vasari derives from vasaio, the Italian for "potter." Spurning the vocation of his father and his grandfather, the young Giorgio took his inspiration from his great-uncle Luca Signorelli, a well-known Florentine artist who nurtured his interest in drawing. "Learn, little kinsman," Signorelli sweetly exhorted the boy. As his schoolmates played outdoors, Giorgio would sit sketching inside the cool, quiet space of churches, which is where you went in 1520 if you wanted to contemplate top-flight examples of painting and sculpture.

In his own telling, Vasari characterizes himself as a frail child who suffered from chronic nosebleeds. His great-uncle Luca proved useful in this area, too. He tried to stanch the boy's bleeding with stones reputed to have healing powers. As Vasari recounts, after Luca heard that "my nose bled so copiously that I sometimes collapsed, he held a piece of red jasper to my neck with infinite tenderness."

Vasari's mother is treated by the authors with puzzling dismissiveness. When we meet Maddalena Tacci, we are told nothing about her, only that Vasari once joked that she gave birth to another child "every nine months." Today, such a joke does not register as funny, and it would have behooved the authors to tell us how many children Maddalena had, or where Giorgio figured in the birth order (in fact he was the firstborn son).

In 1527, when Vasari was 16 and studying in Florence, he learned that his father died of the plague that had descended on his hometown. A few years later, when he was living in Bologna, Vasari decided to return home to Arezzo because he was "worried about how his brothers and sisters were faring without their parents," as the authors write.

Yet his mother was still alive then. She outlived her husband by three decades, dying in 1558, according to standard reference books, such as the Grove Dictionary of Art. It is a little strange, in a biography of this quality, to find the mother of the protagonist rubbed out, as in one of those Disney films in which the moms are killed off at the outset in the interest of dramatizing the embattled status of the hero.

As such an oversight might suggest, the biography as a whole settles for breeziness and even glibness when close analysis is needed. The missing information about Vasari's family life is unsettling precisely because Vasari tended to view artists as if they made up a big Italian family. By connecting artists whose lives spanned three centuries, he produced one of the first books to insist on the continuity of art. Long before Harold Bloom advanced his theory about the "anxiety of influence," Vasari recognized that the struggle for artistic excellence pits living artists against the most formidable precursors.

It took an audacious leap for Vasari to see himself as the defining chronicler of his era, the preserver of life stories, the collector of paper scraps. You might say, based on his recollections of his sickly childhood, that he began life as a sensitive boy alert to the threat of physical extinction. In his work, he attached himself imaginatively to a family that would never die - the family of art history, in which he continues to hold a place of pride as its industrious and chatty paterfamilias.

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the collector of lives: giorgio vasari and the invention of art (book)

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How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It

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His magnum opus, "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," was published in 1550, when Vasari was in his late 30s. It offers a group portrait of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, starting with Cimabue in the 13th century and culminating 300 years later with Michelangelo, who was Vasari's oft-declared favorite and also his friend.

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The first biography of a living artist - Vasari 1550 of Michelangelo

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The first biography of a living artist - Vasari 1550 of Michelangelo

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What if there's not just one artist? (or they're not even artists?)

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What Makes an Artist? Grayson Perry in Conversation with Sarah Thornton | Tate Talks

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Оля Полякова

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Irving Stone Lust for Life 1956  Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald

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The individual artistic genius?