February 18, 2015 – David Young Kim

Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

“Giorgio Vasari’s Technical Treatise: Materiality and Text in the Italian Renaissance”

Nowhere does Giorgio Vasari offer a more sustained discussion of materials than in his introduction to the three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting. Found at the beginning of his monumental work The Lives…(1550/1568), these chapters relate artists’ understanding of materials with issues of geography, artistic process, and the physical behavior of matter.  This talk will conduct close readings of several key passages in the introduction and explore Vasari’s preoccupation with the concept of durability and the promise of the eternal masterpiece.

Kim