Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The discovery of annotations to a copy of Vasari's Vite (1550) in the Beinecke Library at Yale University gives us a rare insight into how the book and contemporary art literature were read and how the information they provided circulated in the Veneto. This article traces the origin of the annotations to the circle of artists and amateurs around the painter Domenico Campagnola in Padua. In polemical reaction to the Florentinism of the Vite, the annotations repeat the major anti-Vasarian arguments elaborated by art writers, but also offer new information about Veneto art. There is also a biographical note on Titian, which precedes the publication of the artist's biography in the second edition of the Vite (1568).
Special thanks to Francesco Caglioti, Claudia Cieri Via, Augusto Gentili, Charles Hope, Franca Nardelli Petrucci, Armando Petrucci, Loren Partridge, Jenna Phillips, Randolph Starn, and Francesca Tataranni. This study also benefitted from a fellowship at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University, and the H. P Kraus Fellowship in Early Books and Manuscripts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, in 2008. I presented on this annotated copy of the Vite at the conference on Vasari organized by Alessandro Nova at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in 2008.