Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 95. (Budapest, 2001)
FRANKLIN, DAVID: Giorgio Vasari's Marriage Feast at Cana in Budapest
1560s Vasari was in control of a large and active workshop of painters, many more superficially talented than himself, the attribution of the Budapest panel will need to be carefully considered in future. This is particularly the case as some doubts have already been raised as to whether Vasari himself executed the Uffizi painting. 17 One possible author of the painting after Vasari's complete design would be Giovanni Battista Naldini, who had a more facile and elegant manner than Vasari, and who was also particularly close relationship in the 1560s with our assumed patron, Vincenzo Borghini. Whoever painted it, Vasari or a talented member of his workshop, the Budapest painting is still fully revealing of his goals as an artist. The object is distinguished by its stylistic refinement and tendency to formal abstraction. The main actions of the attenuated figures have a planar arrangement, with the figures seem to climb up the space. The basic effect is dense, but legible because the principal characters are placed near to the picture plane before a telescoped background. The desire to fill the space with a variety of figures inspired Vasari to produce a somewhat aggregate overall design. Vasari generally preferred relaxed and discontinuous compositions of this type over more rigid ones, and in this his work is comparable to the major recent precedent for this subject: Francesco Salviati's large fresco in the refectory of San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome. Expression is transmitted through facial expressions, poses and gestures that are all exaggerated in a rhetorical way, though this tendency to filter expression into abstract postures did not indicate that Vasari was unwilling to express direct emotion: he frequently wrote in the Lives of the imperative to illustrate narrative clearly and with full emotional force for the spectator. For Vasari the Marriage Feast at Cana as a design conceived originally as part of a narrative cycle would provide a perfect example of this desire in his art. On a more intimate scale, produced quite probably for a collector of unparalleled sophistication, and in a late style, the Budapest painting well summarizes Vasari's artistic ideals. Appendix: payments for Vasari's refectory commission for San Pietro, Perugia Florence, Archivio di Stato, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese, Convento 78, Monasterio della Badia di Firenze, n. 11, Debitori e Creditori, fol. 75 verso: 1564, Sabato add! 2 di Settembre / Aile tasse della congregatione fiorini cinquanta d'oro di moneta, pagati a messer Giorgio Vasari pittore, di commissione e volonte delli reverendi il padre abbate di Santo Pietro di Perugia e del prioré de' Nocenti di Firenze, portö contanti ser Gostantino suo agente, dalla cassa — fiorini 50 fol. 94 recto: 1564, Sabbato [sic] a di 30 detto [December] / Al Monasterio di Santo Piero di Perugia fiorini cinquanta d'oro di moneta di lire sette piccioli per fiorino per detto a Messer Giorgio Vasai [sic] pittore aretino, portö contanti Piero ortolano (?), a libro ac. [blank] — fiorini 50 17 Cecchi, op. cit., p. 246, suggested that Stradanus played a major part in the painting of the refectory paintings and the Uffizi replica (see also, p. 248, note 25). This view was anticipated by Barocchi's observation in 1964 (op. cit. [note 11], p. 62) of the possible participation of two Vasari assistants, the Fleming Stradanus and Jacopo Zucchi, in the execution of the larger paintings for Perugia.
