Apelles's Stories and the "Paragone" Debate: A Re-Reading of the Frescoes in the Casa Vasari in Florence

The frescoes in the Sala delle Arti in the Florentine home of Giorgio Vasari have been the subject of several interpretative studies. These studies have analysed the three scenes from the Elder Pliny's legends on antique artists in relation to Vasari's art-theoretical concepts such as disegno, imitazione, and giudizio. While they have aptly characterized this fresco cycle as "depicted art theory", however, two fundamental questions regarding these frescoes still remain unsolved: First, scholarly opinions are divided as to the identity of the artist painting a female figure in his studio (Apelles or Zeuxis). Second, while some scholars suppose Vincenzo Borghini's intervention to the thematic invention of the fresco cycle, others, to the contrary, assume Vasari's "refusal" of Borghini's advice. This paper attempts to find answers to these questions through a reading of Vasari's pictorial representations against Borghini's art-theoretical thoughts recorded in his manuscript entitled Selva di Notizie (1564). The author points out that the theme of "Apelles painting Diana" had become a topos demonstrating the affinity of painting with poetry in the 16th-century art theory. This idea is eloquently expressed in Borghini's discussion on "Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, and Music", and Borghini's arguments for painting's superiority over sculpture find exact counterparts in Vasari's representations (the great variety of light effects and natural phenome­na, harmonious combination of foreground and background, etc.). Further, Borghini's comparison between well-composed historia and music seems to provide an appropriate explanation for the fact that Vasari included the Allegory of Music next to that of Painting. All these coincidences would suggest that the meanings of the Sala delle Arti frescoes had a kind of "sub-plot" which is a demonstration and exaltation of painting's universal ability to imitate nature in the paragone context. The program of this decoration was most probably suggested by the author of Selva di Notizie, and its implied message is painting's self-eulogy based on the thoughts shared by Vasari and Borghini, especially after the reheated paragone debate around the time of Michelangelo funeral.