The Art Bulletin

The analogical relationship of Michelangelo to Marsyas, which has been typologically linked to Saint Bartholomew, in recent years has been understood in terms of martyrdom. Marsyas is a martyr of art and Bartholomew is a Christian martyr. Placing his art in the service of God, Michelangelo is both. This study seeks to expand the implications of the analogy by turning attention to the two restored classical Marsyas fragments that flanked the entrance into the Medici sculpture garden and by focusing on the symbolic and didactic significance given to them by the first generations of Florentine academicians.

Biographers negotiate their subject through narrative tropes that amplify the historical record with vivid characterizations and moralizing messages. Using death as a central conceit for the artist’s life, Caravaggio’s biographers discovered the essence of his character and his art: materialism, narcissism, morbidity, and naturalism. The idea that an artist projects himself in his art often overshadows another type of projection by biographers where an artist’s biography is written to conform with the visual evidence of his art. This article uses the seventeenth-century reception of Caravaggio as a case study of how biography can be a form of art criticism.

The essay explores problems of secrecy, exchange, and rivalry in artistic biography from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. It first considers Vasari’s account of the invention of oil painting, which offers important insights into Vasari’s larger intellectual project. Exploring the revival of Vasari’s story in the visual culture of French Romanticism, it finds this revival was rooted in part in the fascination many Romantic painters evinced for unusual methods, esoteric materials, and the Eyckian myth of artisanal breakthrough. Writers, finally, as they considered Vasari’s tale, found the opportunity to develop a new mythology of origins for the visual arts.

Auction catalogues from 1689 to 1692 reveal that tens of thousands of pictures were offered for sale in London during these years, but little is known about the purchasers. Using evidence from probate inventories, this article argues that the London middle classes were major buyers of the paintings available at these sales, and that this new group of art consumers was important to the development of both the art market and the art theoretical discourse of the period.