The Delight of Art

Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse David Cast

Publish Date: 8/14/2009
Dimensions: 9 x 10
Page Count: 272 pages

Illustrations:

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-03442-3

Hardcover Edition: $95.00Add to Cart

“Although much of the recent scholarship on Vasari’s great Lives of the Artists has focused on the authorship and production of the book, Cast’s work stands apart as a unique, sustained, and close reading of the whole text, a reading in which the author distills the essence of Vasari’s purposes as a writer. In this respect, there is no work on Vasari quite like Cast’s treatise, which is sophisticated, highly nuanced, and informed by an exceptional philosophical attention to Vasari’s language. I think Cast’s exploration of the concept of ‘attention’ in Vasari enriches our understanding of how art was approached and experienced in the Renaissance.” —Paul Barolsky, University of Virginia

“[The] format accommodates rapid-fire insights that capture the breathless excitement of an animated graduate seminar. . . . All students of the Aretine polymath will remain indebted to Cast for identifying and adumbrating Vasari’s latent, even suppressed, theory of delight in art.” —Jonathan Unglaub, CAA Reviews

The Delight of Art offers a highly original, erudite interpretation of Vasari’s Lives, one of the most influential texts on the arts. David Cast approaches Vasari’s long, tripartite work as a complex rhetorical history rather than as an archival document mined for facts about the artists. He focuses on the delight Vasari mentions in his accounts of viewers’ responses to works by artists from Giotto to Michelangelo. Cast finds in delight what might be called a threshold into the arena where the cultural and social orders met to produce a sphere of subjectivity as well as that of the compelling Renaissance invention, the artist.

David Cast is Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Defining the Terms

2. Talking of Art

3. Thinking About History

4. Describing the Artist

Appendix: The Evening Discussion

Notes

Selected Bibliography