Over the course of his long and prolific career, artist, architect and artist biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) left an indelible mark on the city of Florence. In addition to designing the Uffizi and the elevated corridor that connects it to the Palazzo Pitti, he renovated Florentine churches and transformed the interior of the Palazzo Vecchio from the seat of a Republic into a ducal residence. It was also in Florence that Vasari passed away 450 years ago on June 27, 1574, a little over one month shy of his 63rd birthday.
Thanks to accounts preserved in the Vasari family archive in his hometown of Arezzo, Vasari’s death and commemoration are well-documented. They show that, in mid-June of 1574, doctors from the Florentine hospital of Santa Maria Nuova treated Vasari for an unspecified illness and an orderly kept watch over the infirm artist for eight days. A payment for an unguent made from scorpions and sweet almond oil also appears among the pre- and post-mortem expenses. In the Renaissance, this concoction was best known as an antidote to poison, but for centuries it had also been used to cure a wide variety of ailments that ranged from plague to animal and snake bites, kidney stones and fever, and Vasari apparently was treated with it before his death.
The Medici court was known throughout Europe for producing a variation of scorpion oil, whose recipe was ascribed to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-74). Typically, it was made in August, when scorpion venom was believed to be most potent, via a process that involved steeping, and then heating as many as 300 of the stinging arachnids and various other ingredients in oil that had been aged for up to 100 years. The Medici gifted their oil to friends and other nobles, and as one of the most prominent and reliable artists of the Florentine court, the ailing Vasari surely was entitled to such a present. The accounts, however, indicate that it was purchased, instead of being bestowed upon the dying artist by Cosimo I’s heir, Grand Duke Francesco I (1541-87), or a member of his court.
The myriad uses of scorpion oil make it impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of Vasari’s death and, in the end, the treatments he underwent were for naught. The accounts show that before Vasari’s remains were placed in a wooden casket, surgeons at Santa Maria Nuova removed his internal organs. One scholar interpreted this post-mortem surgery as an autopsy, but the evisceration of Vasari’s body must have been an embalming procedure of the type that had been carried out for centuries to slow decay and avoid unpleasant smells. Given that Vasari died in Florence during the summer and expected to be buried in Arezzo, slowing the putrefaction of his remains would have been a particular concern. The artist’s viscera were placed in a casket of their own and buried by gravediggers, and Vasari’s body was transported to Arezzo under the watchful eye of one of his nephews and accompanied by four penitent flagellants, each of whom carried a lit candle. They processed from Vasari’s home near Santa Croce, across the Arno River, as far as the San Niccolò gate. From there, the cart bearing Vasari’s body continued the journey south, its entrance into Arezzo signaling the posthumous return of one of the city’s most prestigious sons.
In accordance with his final wishes, Vasari was laid to rest near the high altar he had built between 1560 and 1564 for the prestigious Romanesque church of the Pieve. As the man who commemorated past and contemporary artistic stars in his groundbreaking Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, it comes as no surprise that Vasari devoted considerable thought, energy and expense to his own posthumous commemoration. His freestanding funerary altar is covered on four sides with more than two dozen iconic, narrative, and allegorical paintings and family portraits. Those paintings include a dynamic image of Vasari’s patron saint, George, engaged in his signature act of slaying the dragon. Holding his rearing steed’s reins in one hand, St. George raises the curved blade of his saber above his head with the other as he prepares to finish off the menacing creature, whose mouth and neck he previously pierced with his spear. Snapped in two by the force of the impact, the weapon’s broken shaft lies on the ground amid a gory assemblage of bones and the decomposing body of one of the dragon’s victims—a vivid reminder of the inevitability of death that was appropriate for a funerary chapel.
In 1865, during a neo-medievalizing renovation, the Pieve was emptied of its altars and artworks, its east end reconstructed in its present, bi-level form and Vasari’s high altar was dismantled and reassembled in Arezzo’s Badia of Sts. Flora and Lucilla, where it remains. There is a certain amount of justice inherent in that turn of events, as in the Florentine churches he renovated, Vasari himself saw to the displacement, obfuscation and eradication of countless medieval and early modern works. Despite its relocation, the monumental altar from the Pieve that stood above Vasari’s tomb for nearly three centuries continues to testify to the personal and artistic legacy of a man who is better known for preserving and promoting the memory and reputations of artists other than himself.
