Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2011)
Giovanni Battista Adriani and the drafting of the second edition of the Vite: the unpublished manuscript of the Lettera a Messer Giorgio Vasari in the Archivio Borromeo (Stresa, Italy)
Abstract
This essay will focus its attention on the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (Giunti, 1568) that took advantage of the constant collaboration of Vincenzio Borghini (1515-1580), and, secondly, that of Giovanni Battista Adriani (1511-1579). The fortunate rediscovery of the autograph manuscript of the Lettera sull’arte degli Antichi by Giovanni Battista Adriani (Letter on the ancients’ art), inserted in the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (compare Vasari, Vite, ed. by Bettarini-Barocchi, I, 176-227), allows us to reconsider the sources used by the prestigious member of the Medici court to write this section, in primis Pliny. Just from a review of the editions on the market in Florence in the sixties of the sixteenth century, an analysis can begin of the diffusion of the Plinian text both printed and in manuscript form, in order to highlight its continuing transmission from one cultural milieu to another, in an unbroken succession going from Landino’s ‘volgarizzamento’ (1476) to the Italian version of Brucioli (1543) and finally at Domenichi’s translation. Each attempt at an understanding of the Letter should in the future, certainly, start from this manuscript, which shows in a tangible way the collaboration of the Florentine historical writer with Vasari: by documenting the drafting stage with modifications and additions to his text made by Adriani, I think it could also be a useful way to approach the methods used by Vasari to create the Lives, one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance literature.
