Rewriting history: Vasari'sLife of Lorenzo Ghiberti

Abstract

The Life of Lorenzo Ghiberti, as we read it in the second part of the 1550 edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, is introduced by the following title: ‘Vita di Lorenzo Ghiberti pittore fiorentino’ [‘The life of Lorenzo Ghiberti, Florentine painter’] (the 1568 edition presents the variant, simply ‘pittore’1). My aim in this essay is to explain why Vasari, in the biography of Ghiberti, assigned to the master of the Doors of Paradise of the Florentine Baptistery the title of ‘pittore’, instead of that of ‘scultore’ as we might have expected. This may seem an incidental, even trivial, point but the unexpected label of Ghiberti as painter signals several important issues regarding Vasari's views on Ghiberti and Renaissance art history.

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