Was Vasari the author of the Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects is the question addressed while using computational methods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Most_Excellent_Painters,_Sculptors,_and_Architects)
The second edition of the Lives published in 1568 is a huge investigation work that gathers a great amount of information about the lives of who Vasari considered the best artists at that time. If many of them were Florentin, they were also past artists and the work would have required investigating and comparing several sources of information. Then the nature and the workload of this investigation naturally questions the real process of writing: was Vasari the only one to write it?
In her essay “Reconsidering the Authorship of the 'Lives'” (2015), the Italian scholar Eliana Carrara is claiming that the theses of “kollektive Autorschaft” (Carrara (2015), p. 53) which was put forward and prevailed by some Anglo-Saxon historians, arose from “the difficulty that non-Italian-speaking scholars had in fully understanding the introductory sections of the Lives” which led to the highly controversial conclusion that several Florentine men connected to the Accademia Fiorentina were contributing to the Lives. Following Carrara, it would be essential for any serious exploration to pay the utmost attention to precisely the words and expressions that Vasari had used since his earliest letters.
Even though this approach is predestined for a quantitative method, our further research failed to identify any attempt at quantitative authorship verification on Vasari’s Lives.
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Anna Sophia Bauer | anna.bauer@epfl.ch |
| Marion Lehembre | marion.lehembre@unil.ch |
| Zijun Cui | zijun.cui@epfl.ch |
Delta score distribution for the considered selection of authorship candidates, based on the Lives (edition 1568) compared to correspondances, collected from Fondazione Memofonte (https://www.memofonte.it/ricerche/giorgio-vasari/).
Extract from our bibliography:
CARRARA, Eliana (2015). Reconsidering the Authorship of the 'Lives'. Some Observations and Methodological Questions on Vasari as a Writer. Studi di Memofonte. 15. p. 53-90.
EDER, Maciej (2016). Rolling stylometry. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31(3): p. 457-469.
HOPE, Charles (2014). Vasari’s Vite as a Collaborative Project. In: Cast, D.J. (Ed.). The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari (1st ed.). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315613017.
NOVA, Alessandro (2014). Vasari versus Vasari, in: Bild - Sprachen : Kunst und visuelle Kultur in der italienischen Renaissance, p. 139-169.