The (Italian for ''Book of Drawings'') was a collection of drawings gathered, sorted, and grouped by

Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, art historian, and biographer who is best known for his work ''Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects'', considered the ideol ...

whilst writing his ''

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects ''The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects'' () is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the ...

''. By the time of his death in 1574 it is thought to have contained around 526 drawings, of which 162 are now in the

Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Rive Droite, Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement of Paris, 1st arron ...

and 83 in the

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm Nationalmuseum is the List of national galleries, national gallery of fine arts of Sweden, located on the peninsula Blasieholmen in central Stockholm. The museum's operations stretch far beyond the borders of Blasieholmen, including the Natio ...

. There are also drawings from the in the prints and drawings departments of the

Uffizi The Uffizi Gallery ( ; , ) is a prominent art museum adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of th ...

, the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

, the

Albertina The Albertina is a museum in the Innere Stadt (First District) of Vienna, Austria. It houses one of the largest and most important print rooms in the world with approximately 65,000 drawings and approximately 1 million old master prints, as well ...

, the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

and other institutions.

Origins and dispersal

Some art historians believe they were gathered to illustrate Vasari's ''Lives'' directly, as a visual index of the artists' works, whilst others believe it was a separate document in its own right. In his preface to the ''Lives'', Vasari described his reasons for writing: No text reveals why Vasari compiled his collection of drawings, but it was probably to illustrate the styles of the different artists he wrote about and to show how he had divided them "into three parts, or rather let us call them periods, between the rebirth of the arts and our own time - each of these is distinguished from the others by manifest differences". The earliest drawing in the collection was by

Cimabue Giovanni Cimabue ( , ; – 1302), Translated with an introduction and notes by J.C. and P Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), 1991, pp. 7–14. . also known as Cenni di Pepo or Cenni di Pepi, was an Italian p ...

and the latest dated to Vasari's own time. In the 1550 and 1568 editions of the ''Lives'' Vasari insisted on drawings as documents which allowed the viewer to perceive the ''maniera'' of the great masters of painting and mentioned when he owned one or two drawings by a particular artist, such as at the end of his life of

Filippo Lippi Filippo Lippi ( – 8 October 1469), also known as Lippo Lippi, was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Quattrocento (fifteenth century) and a Carmelite priest. He was an early Renaissance master of a painting workshop, who taught many paint ...

: ("Fra Filippo drew very well, as one can see in my own of the most famous painters, in the preparatory drawings for the altarpiece at Santo Spirito and the frescoes in the Prato chapel.") and in his life of

Sandro Botticelli Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi ( – May 17, 1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli ( ; ) or simply known as Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 1 ...

("Sandro's drawings were of a totally unique excellence; and, after his death, more and more artists have been keen to have some of his drawings; and I myself, in my collection, have a few which were done with great care and judgement"). Giorgio Vasari was one of the founders of the

Accademia delle Arti del Disegno The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno ("Academy of the Arts of Drawing") is an academy of artists in Florence, in Italy. It was founded on 13 January 1563 by Cosimo I de' Medici, under the influence of Giorgio Vasari. It was initially known as ...

set up in

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

by Cosimo I of Tuscany in 1563. He and the other founders wished to use this academy to promote artists above the status of artisans. He was also a passionate collector of drawings and in his he set them in his own paper frames and gathered drawings by one or more painters on a single sheet. In 1528 he received a collection of

Lorenzo Ghiberti Lorenzo Ghiberti (, , ; 1378 – 1 December 1455), born Lorenzo di Bartolo, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence, a key figure in the Early Renaissance, best known as the creator of two sets of bronze doors of the Florence Baptister ...

's drawings, as one of Ghiberti's descendants. After Vasari's death, the sheets of the were initially bought in 1574 by the Florentine collector

Niccolò Gaddi Niccolò Gaddi (1499–1552) was an Italian Roman Catholic cardinal. Biography Niccolò Gaddi was born in Florence in 1499, the son of Taddeo Gaddi and Antonia Altoviti. He was a direct descendant of medieval painter Taddeo Gaddi. He was t ...

(1537-1591). They were then sold by Gaddi's heirs before 18 May 1638, the date of death of Lorenzo Sabbatini, who had been put in charge of the . They were then dispersed among the

Medici The House of Medici ( , ; ) was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first consolidated power in the Republic of Florence under Cosimo de' Medici and his grandson Lorenzo "the Magnificent" during the first half of the 15th ...

Arundel Arundel ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the Arun District of the South Downs, West Sussex, England. The much-conserved town has a medieval castle and Roman Catholic cathedral. Arundel has a museum and comes second behind much la ...

, Quesnel, Crozat and Mariette collections during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Collections

European collections

Albertina

British Museum

Ecole des Beaux Arts

Louvre

The first drawings from the to enter the French national collection were bought by

Everhard Jabach Everhard or Eberhard Jabach (10 July 1618 – 9 March 1695) was a French businessman, art collector, and director of the French East India Company. He was born in Cologne in the Holy Roman Empire but later naturalised as a French subject. Life H ...

, probably when the Arundel collections were sold in 1646 and 1654 after his and his widow's deaths. They then passed from Jabach into

Louis XIV LouisXIV (Louis-Dieudonné; 5 September 16381 September 1715), also known as Louis the Great () or the Sun King (), was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His verified reign of 72 years and 110 days is the List of longest-reign ...

's drawings collection in 1671. Further sheets from the were added when the French royal collection bought part of the collection of Mariette in 1755 and when Saint-Morys's collection was seized by the revolutionary government in 1793. These later additions may have originated in the sale of the Crozat collection, for which a catalogue survives. Part of the Mariette collection was sold to the royal collection in 1775. Other pages entered the French national collection from

émigré An ''émigré'' () is a person who has emigrated, often with a connotation of political or social exile or self-exile. The word is the past participle of the French verb ''émigrer'' meaning "to emigrate". French Huguenots Many French Hugueno ...

goods seized by the revolutionary government and via gift and purchase.

Munich

Stockholm

The museum acquired 83 drawings from the as part of the

Pierre Crozat Pierre Crozat (1665–1740) was a French financier, art patron and collector at the center of a broad circle of ''cognoscenti''; he was the brother of Antoine Crozat. Biography The brothers Crozat were born in Toulouse, France, the sons of a wea ...

and

Carl Gustaf Tessin Count Carl Gustaf Tessin (5 September 1695 – 7 January 1770) was a Swedish Count and politician and son of architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger and Hedvig Eleonora Stenbock. He was one of the most brilliant personages of his day, and the mo ...

collections. They include

Domenico Ghirlandaio Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi (2 June 1448 – 11 January 1494), professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio (also spelt as Ghirlandajo), was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-c ...

's '' Head of an Old Man'', a study for his 1490 painting '' An Old Man and his Grandson'', now in the

Uffizi

US collections

Metropolitan

National Gallery of Art

Yale

Notes

References

Bibliography

* Otto Kurz, ''Giorgio Vasari's Libro de'Disegni'', Old Masters Drawings, 1937 * Arthur Ewart Popham, ''Drawings from the collection of Giorgio Vasari'', , ''

British Museum Quarterly The ''British Museum Quarterly'' was a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the British Museum. It described recent acquisitions and research concerning the museum's collections and was published from 1926 to 1973. It is available electron ...

'', 1936 * Per Bjurstrom, ''Italian Drawings from the Collection of Giorgio Vasari'', National Museum, Stockholm, 2001 * Andrew Morrogh, ''Vasari's Libro de' Disegni and Niccolò Gaddi's Collection of Drawings: The Work of Gaddi's "Chief Framer"'', conference paper at the RSA Annual Meeting, New York, NY, Hilton New York, 2014 * Stéfania Caliandro, ''Le Libro de' Disegni de Giorgio Vasari: un métatexte visuel'', Presses universitaires de l'université de Limoges, 1999
''Sample''
* Giorgio Vasari, ''Les vies des meilleurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes'', édition commentée sous la direction d'

André Chastel André Chastel (15 November 1912, Paris – 18 July 1990, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French art historian, author of an important work on the Italian Renaissance. He was a professor at the Collège de France, where he held the chair of art and civil ...

, ''Du texte à l'image. Dessins du "Libro"'', Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1989 * Catherine Monbeig-Goguel, ''Giorgio Vasari : Dessinateur et collectionneur, XXXVIe exposition du Cabinet des dessins du musée du Louvre'', Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1965 * Catherine Monbeig Goguel, ''Dessins italiens au musée du Louvre, deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle (artistes nés après 1500 et morts avant 1580). Vasari et son temps'', Éditions des Musées nationaux, Paris, 1972 , présentation du livre : , École pratique des hautes études. 4e, Sciences historiques et philologiques, année 197
(''read online'')
* Catherine Monbeig Goguel, ''Le dessin encadré'', , Revue de l'Art, année 1987, No. 7
(''online'')
* Alphonse Wyatt, ''Le Libro dei Disegni de Vasari'', , Gazette des beaux-arts, octobre-novembre-décembre 1859
(''online'')
* Licia Ragghianti Collobi, ''Il Libro de' Disegni del Vasari'', Vallecchi, Florence, 1996

External links

* National Gallery of Art

* Musée du Louvre - Département des Arts graphiques
Exposition : ''Giorgio Vasari : dessinateur et collectionneur. XXXVIe exposition du Cabinet des Dessins'' (1965)
* Base Joconde
Les 162 dessins de la collection de Vasari du cabinet des dessins
{{DEFAULTSORT:Libro de' Disegni Renaissance art Italian Renaissance Italian culture-related lists Arts-related lists Collection of the National Gallery of Art Drawings in the Louvre Collection of Nationalmuseum Collection of the Uffizi Collection of the Albertina, Vienna Prints and drawings in the British Museum Giorgio Vasari