David Cast

Finishing the Sistine

This article concerns the idea of finish for Michelangelo and artists of the early sixteenth century; the degree to which any parts in the accounts by Condivi and Vasari can be taken as records of the things that actually happened; and finally the nature of the Ceiling from the record of its commentators, especially since it now seems to be close to its original condition.

Speaking of Architecture: The Evolution of a Vocabulary in Vasari, Jones, and Sir John Vanbrugh

The reading Jones gave to the books he owned could serve him in various ways. This article is concerned with one such use he made of the materials in the Vite by Giorgio Vasari, one volume of which we know he possessed and on which he made notes. It is suggested that this text gave him an opportunity to construct a critical vocabulary for architecture, different in character from that available to him from such sources as Palladio, Vitruvius, or Serlio. And it is also suggested that this new vocabulary is specifically reflected in two passages about architecture, and in what J. A. Gotch called Jones9 sentiments about architecture, written in the notebook now at Chatsworth. In addition, this article is concerned with the development of a more general vocabulary in England in the seventeenth century, for gentlemen and architects alike, that came from the tradition of praise, or epideixis, together with terms of a more particular kind to refer to the parts of architecture that came both from Italian and French.

Vasari on Models and Mistresses

This is a very brief essay on a theme familiar enough within the history of Renaissance art, namely the fact that an artist used his wife or mistress as a model for the figures in his painting.* Yet for all the brevity and familiarity of its subject, this note can, I trust, serve as an appropriate way to celebrate the work of Paul Barolsky, not only because it depends on the testimony of Giorgio Vasari but also because it moves between fiction and fact in ways so in accord with the attention Paul has given to the text of Le vite. And more than that, for behind what is here, as so often in Paul’s work, there rests a larger issue, even if it is one not openly spoken of, that is to say, whether any artist working on a portrait of Our Lady—to take one such frequent

On Leonardo not finishing: Then and later

Abstract I am concerned here with the artistic and intellectual enterprise of Leonardo or, more specifically, with coming to a fuller understanding of a vital detail in the record of his life, namely that he did very little work or left unfinished so many of the projects he had begun. For some who spoke of this, the problem was one merely of character, that in his behavior Leonardo was wayward and too easily distracted always from what was at hand. Yet for others this not finishing was more about intellectual doubts and a certain dissatisfaction he felt with the practice of art, stemming from a sense of the distance between the concept of a work and how this concept is realized in the art itself. Such an account of not finishing is set in the terms of Neoplatonism and to the extent that this was a language so much recognized in the Renaissance, it is deeply appropriate as an explanation of what indeed Leonardo himself might have thought of his task as an artist. And it is language we will return to often.

Representing reality: G. E. Moore, Tonks, Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and others

Abstract I have given myself two tasks here. The first is to reconstruct a particular description of realist painting defined in England in the early years of this century. The second is to set this description, which I take from the remarks of the realist painters involved, against the contemporary tradition of realist philosophers in England who believed in what we can call both the simple and philosophical levels of analysis - this is what hcre we will mean philosophically by realism - that we can be sure a world exists, independent of us and of any interpretative actions on our part. And yet, despite this independence from us - and this is what I mean by the simple level of analysis - that we can also believe this world, within limits, is knowable to us. Hence here the invocation of Moore, that most exemplary of realist philosophers; hence then also the names of Henry Tonks, a realist painter and teacher at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London from 1893 to 1930, of William Coldstream, and of his friend Victor Pasmore, who continued this practice of painting, first as a student under Tonks at the Slade School from 1926 to 1929, then after the Second World War as Principal and Professor of Painting there from 1949 to 1975.1