Vasari and the ‘ruina estrema’ of the Middle Ages: genesis and developments of an idea Barbara Forti In the Vite de più eccellenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani by Giorgio Vasari, Medieval art finds its first real historical...
moreVasari and the ‘ruina estrema’ of the Middle Ages: genesis and developments of an idea Barbara Forti In the Vite de più eccellenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani by Giorgio Vasari, Medieval art finds its first real historical analysis, together with the codification of a set of elements which properly embody the idea of the artistic Middle Ages. After the spreading of the book in the Modern age, both the equivalence Medieval art = barbarians’art (not really by Vasari, actually) and the conception of the artistic Middle Ages as ‘ruina estrema’ (extreme ruin) get strenghtened; as a consequence, they deeply influenced the opinion about the period. Still nowadays, an old-fashioned tradition lies on the concept and the term itself of Middle Ages, swinging for centuries between two ends: the evaluation, not always positive indeed, by historiographers and the unquestionable fascination caused by that age, in spite of its negative features. The survey about the Middle Ages carried out by Vasari, as both a historiographer and an artist, is very cogent; nonetheless, the pars destruens of his speech is definetely the largest one and the most well-known. Vasari himself claims that the Renaissance artist tries to imitate nature, by selecting its best aspects and translating what is catched by the eye in reality exactly like it appears. On the other hand, the Medieval artist ‘seems’ to ignore some technical and formal devices of Antiquity, which allow to construct human figures precisely, for instance, or to depict space, and to prefer some other ones, undoubtedly far from the concept of art as mimesis. Vasari gets those elements, but he can not accept them aesthetically. According to the author, the Medieval artist comes down with a serious visual pathology. Vasari does not comprehend that his highest ambition is making visible what is not and, because of that, his way of representing space gets more and more rarefied, and figures together with decorations entirely fill surfaces, erasing any depth. The historiographer can not figure out the Medieval artist’s point of view perfectly matches with the beholder’s one, nor this last one does not expect to see the world depicted as it appears. Vasari portrays the Medieval artist just ex negativo, knowing what he is not and what he lacks with respect to the Modern one. Notwithstanding this, in that comparison the Modern artist, whom we would expect totally winner, gets redimensioned. As a matter of fact, the epilogue of the giuntina edition comes to an unexpected statement: the last consideration by Vasari about the Middle Ages equals to the acknowledgment of the importance of ‘old’ art and of ‘old’ makers regarding the phenomenon of rebirth. Modern artists are looked at like dwarfs on giants’shoulders who can glance far into the distance just because they are lifted up by the ones that came first, and without those ones they would have never reached the ‘sommo grado’ (the highest level). Finally, Vasari, generally regarded as one of the main responsible for the conception of the artistic Middle Ages as ‘ruina estrema’ and of the florentine Renaissance as the last millennium unique cultural expression, is also one of the first to understand there is a dependence relationship between Modern Art and previous, so vituperated actually, Medieval art.
