“Gratta da Vinci” – Scratch and Win…a “da Vinci”! the Battle over the Battle of Anghiari, by Michel Miller
When Daniel Gallagher began his 500th birthday tribute to Giorgio Vasari in late September with an article on the Salone del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, he had little idea that the investigation into the survival and location of the remains of a lost wall painting by Leonardo da Vinci, about which he wrote so benignly, would lead to the sudden storm of protest which has now brought the work to a halt.
Monsignor Gallagher chose to begin his series there, because the decoration of the Salone del Cinquecento, the largest state room in the world at the time, marked a high point in his career, as his work for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici reached its grandest scale. This included six monumental frescoes, groups of three on the east and west walls, illustrating the military victories of Florence which led to its rule of all of Tuscany. Today thousands of exhausted tourists slog through the Salone, where heads of state used to approach the government of Florence and the Medici Dukes, most probably with little notion of why their guides have led them there or of what is to be made of the huge frescoes, which most likely impress them as particularly hideous. Hardly a one bothers to raise his or her point-and-shoot aloft to view the frescoes on their illuminated screens—which now seems to be the only way to look at art, at least abroad. While Giorgio Vasari was a man of an extraordinarily broad range of powerful capabilities, ranging from drawing to management and politics, the individual manifestations of his talent still appeal to a rather small group of enthusiasts and scholars, beginning with a renaissance of Vasarian studies in the 1960s. To my mind his greatest achievements are in his drawings, the Uffizi Palace, and the splendid designs he created to decorate his collection of drawings. From this core, I have learned to appreciate his panel paintings and frescoes. Still, it is hard to overcome the wish that S. Croce and Sta. Maria Novella still looked as they did in...say...1530, before Vasari's renovations. The splendid exhibitions you have read about on the Review, thanks to Dan Gallagher, have done much to counteract the attitude I have just described, and I only wish I could have been there myself to see them. There is no doubt that in this year, Giorgio is recovering much of the luster his achievement deserves.

