Elsevier

Poetics

Volume 34, Issue 1, February 2006, Pages 24-44
Poetics

Persistence and fashion in art Italian Renaissance from Vasari to Berenson and beyond

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2005.07.001Get rights and content

Abstract

In his Vite (1568), Giorgio Vasari systematically describes the lives and works of some 250 painters from the Italian Renaissance. This paper focuses on the survival of these artists’ reputations in the past four centuries. The length of the entries in seven famous art histories written between 1550 and 1996 is used as a proxy to measure these reputations. Though some artists appear, disappear or reappear, there is a surprisingly large degree of consensus over time: among the first 50 to whom scholars devote space, one half is recognized at all times. This observation is sustained by several statistical tests, which all confirm this view for the 250 artists discussed in the paper: their rankings are strongly correlated over time. The dataset does not permit to decide whether this is due to the aesthetic quality attributed to artists (or their works), or to the social consensus that has built around them.

Section snippets

Victor Ginsburgh is honorary professor of economics at the University of Brussels. He wrote and edited a dozen of books and is the author of over 140 papers in applied and theoretical economics, including industrial organization and general equilibrium analysis. His recent work includes economics of arts, wines and languages. He has published over 40 papers on these topics, some of which appeared in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of

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  • Cited by (0)

    Victor Ginsburgh is honorary professor of economics at the University of Brussels. He wrote and edited a dozen of books and is the author of over 140 papers in applied and theoretical economics, including industrial organization and general equilibrium analysis. His recent work includes economics of arts, wines and languages. He has published over 40 papers on these topics, some of which appeared in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Perspectives and Journal of the European Economic Association. He is coeditor of a Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006).

    Sheila Weyers has a degree in philosophy, and is interested in aesthetics and its relations with art history. She has published on movies, including remakes, on the art historian de Piles, and is now working on how to evaluate art and on canons. Her papers appeared in Artibus et Historiae, the Journal of Cultural Economics and Annales d’Histoire de l’Art et d’Archéologie.

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