The rare copy of Vasari's Lives at auction is in public hands: bought by the City of Siena

The rare copy of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the first edition of 1568 with manuscript notes by Federico Zuccari that went up for auction last Wednesday, Dec. 15, at Pandolfini’s in Florence, ends up in public hands: the three precious volumes were in fact bought by the Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati di Siena, an institution of the City of Siena. The rare edition of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which started from an estimate of between 35 and 45,000 euros, was awarded for the sum of 43,750 euros.

The three volumes that make up the work are those published by Giunti in Florence in 1568, the second version expanded and revised by the biographer of the artists of his most famous literary enterprise, and they have the peculiarity of bearing numerous annotations, among which those of the painter Federico Zuccari (1539-1609), preserved in the third tome, stand out. The same artist had postillated two other copies of the same Vasarian edition, one now at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and the other at the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid later owned, and annotated, by El Greco.

However, the copy purchased by the Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati also holds another reason for extraordinary interest since it is precisely the one used by the scholar Gaetano Milanesi for the two editions of Vasari’s Lives that he edited, first in 1846-1857 and then between 1878 and 1885. The third book had belonged to Cavalier Alessandro Saracini, who was Superintendent of the Institute of Fine Arts and participated in the intense cultural life of Siena at the turn of the two halves of the 19th century. After the employment of Milanesi, who transcribed Zuccari’s notes profusely, but not in their entirety, all trace of these volumes of the Lives had been lost, so much so that most scholars now believed them to be lost.

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’Talking’ signs present in the first and third volumes make it possible to trace with some precision the vicissitudes of the specimen which probably passed very early into Sienese hands, since on their title page appears a note of possession by Alfonso Landi, author in the mid-seventeenth century of that ’Tale’ of the Cathedral of Siena which Enzo Carli gave to the presses in 1992 and of which the Library preserves two manuscript copies. The strong link of these Lives with the Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, of which Gaetano Milanesi was librarian, is also reaffirmed by the fact that it is precisely the Sienese institution that preserves all the ’Milanesi papers,’ that is, the manuscripts and correspondence of both Gaetano and Carlo Milanesi. A different history, at least for some time, must have had the second volume of the Lives included in the lot offered by the auction house: indeed, it seems certain that it was approached to the ’Sienese’ pair only in later times. It is, however, not only an essential element for the unity of the work, but also a specimen worthy of interest, both because of the presence of a drawing corresponding to Correggio’s life and because, before becoming part of the library of the Ligurian physician Giovanni Saverio Carenzi, active in Urbino, it belonged to the Genoese painter Cesare Corte (1550-1613).

The possibility of a direct examination after more than a century and a half will certainly lead to new discoveries and clarifications on the history of the volumes and the content of the manuscript notes, just as a comparison with the specimens postillated by Zuccari preserved in Paris and Madrid will allow to better define the chronology and the critical and documentary scope of the great Mannerist painter’s postilles.

“A specimen of considerable value,” comments Siena Mayor Luigi De Mossi, “for art historical studies and of exceptional interest for our city.”

The rare copy of Vasari's Lives at auction is in public hands: bought by the City of Siena

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