Renaissance Snippets

Giorgio Vasari, like so many other Renaissance Italians, strove mightily to make a name as a great painter. He failed. But history has remembered him for an enduring hobby: gathering snippets of fact & fiction, bright sayings, and queer habits of his fellow painters.

His 1,500-page Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters and Sculptors of Italy made Vasari the world's first art historian. But for him, many an early Renaissance master would be unknown today, many a masterpiece unattributed. Last week, a 300-page abridgement of Vasari's Lives (edited by Betty Burroughs; Simon & Schuster; $3.75) let laymen in on some brisk reading that had previously been buried in a mass of scholarly detail. The new Lives were almost as easy going as a gossip column, and for much the same reason. Sample:

"Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . wore stockings of dogskin for months together, and when he took them off the skin of the leg sometimes came with them." Once, Pier Soderini (a Florentine politician) said he thought the nose of the David too short, so Michelangelo "took his chisel and a little loose marble dust in his hand and climbed the scaffolding. As he tapped lightly on the chisel, he let the marble dust drift down. 'I like it better now,' said Soderini. 'You have given it life.'"

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