First…welcome again to ARTH 470Z and the latest Venice exhibit.  I enjoyed hearing about your interests in Venice and ideas on possible research topics.  I hope you’ll take a few minutes to comment to this post about those research ideas.  So respond in the box below and jot down a few lines.

My own research on Venice focuses on Giorgio Vasari’s account of the city in his Lives of the Artists, both 1550 and 1568 editions.  We tend to see Vasari as highly critical of Venice — it’s a place of luxury, the painters focus too much on color as opposed to drawing, they don’t have excellent models to follow, etc., etc.  And yet the city is, in its own way, central to the Third Part (the art of his time) of his Lives…and that’s what I find intriguing.