Botticelli et Vasari: points et réflexions sur la biographie du peintre

[Machine translation] The essay reviews the 'Life' dedicated by Giorgio Vasari to Sandro Botticelli in the two editions of the 'Lives' (1550, 1568), verifying, sources and documentary data in hand, the validity of numerous statements by the great historiographer. At the same time, the essay proceeds to analyze the variations made by Vasari in the second version of the biography, trying and identifying the reasons why he wanted to further mortify the artist's profile, outlined through terms that Vasari reserves only for a few other artists (from Paolo Uccello to Piero di Cosimo to Giovan Antonio Bazzi) similarly painted as' whimsical ',' restless' and whose personality is characterized by 'neglect' and 'bestality'. The identification of such a character and such a profile ends up not only contrasting, but ultimately also overriding Vasari's appreciation for qualities, and above all the 'beauty' of Sandro Botticelli's works, from the youthful ones to 'The Slander' of the nineties of the fifteenth century for which the biographer has almost a veneration. Beyond the analysis of the two texts and the verification of the changes made, of how they went to dampen the few steps in which, in 1550, Vasari had expressed appreciation, also highlighting Sandro's ties with the Florentine artistic environment and with the Medici, the essay seeks to identify the motivations of what appears to be a real operation of 'character assassination', according to the definition of U. Rhem. In the transition between the first and second editions, through the trivialization of beauty (the term is used very often within 'Life') and strategically eliminating references to the historical context, Vasari arrived at a substantial flattening both of the narrative tone of this' Life 'and of the biography itself. If critics tend to attribute Vasari's lack of sympathy for him to Botticelli's supposed approach to the Savonarolian world and the subsequent reading of his events in the light of the events that characterized Florentine life during the Savonarola years, Botticelli's Vasarian 'Life', in the two versions, should instead be read within the architecture of the 'Lives', in the logic of its complex construction and in that of the different and respective weights and balances distributed in it among the artists.