Today as history: Vasari’s Naples Resurrection and visual memory

Abstract

Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-74) literary contributions to the discipline of art history are incontestable. Rarely has scholarly literature given commensurate weight to his paintings. This article examines one of Vasari’s mid-career works, the Naples Resurrection (1545), and argues that the paintingsimultaneously typifies and singularly challenges the traditions of artistic production of its time through explicit and implicit references to Vasari’s contemporaries, namely Rosso Fiorentino, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael. A careful reading of these borrowings, some of which have long gone unnoticed, provides a new perspective on this often-overlooked painting and offers a deeper understanding of Vasari’s deliberate attempts at self-promotion and his relationship to the art of his time. This article considers how Vasari’s artistic practice embodied sixteenth-century themes of imitation and invention and had larger impacts on individual artistic identities and broader visual memory.