Government urged to buy Vasari papers
Renaissance art chronicler's archives up for auction next week
04 March, 17:52
(ANSA) - Arezzo, March 4 - The mayor of Arezzo on Thursday
urged the government to make a bid for the archives of
Renaissance art chronicler Giorgio Vasari, which go on sale next
week at a highly-anticipated auction in Tuscany.Bids for the Vasari papers will begin at 2.6 million euros, a figure Mayor Giuseppe Fanfani said was well within the government's reach.
"This is a unique opportunity to secure a cultural treasure for future generations, something the city of Arezzo cannot do on its own for lack of funds," Fanfani said in an open letter to Culture Minister Sandro Bondi.
He added that 2.6 million euros was a reasonable price to pay for the Vasari papers, which contain correspondence from such famous 16th-century figures as Michelangelo, Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo I de' Medici as well as a number of popes. "I can assure you that by deciding to acquire these documents, you will not only have preserved a Italian cultural treasure, but earned the respect and admiration of the people of Arezzo," he concluded.
Should the government buy the documents, it would spell the final act in a long and tangled story of a Tuscany family's attempt to sell them.
The Vasari papers are currently owned by the descendants of the late Count Giovanni Festari, who purportedly arranged to sell them to a Russian gas magnate shortly before his death summer.
Fanfani sounded the alarm in October when Tuscan culture authorities informed him that the papers had been sold for over 150 million euros, an offer the state had half a year to match.
The news caused a furore among art lovers around the world who launched a grassroots appeal to the culture ministry to intervene.
It also raised eyebrows among authorities, who were suspicious that anyone would make such a large offer for an item they could never physically possess.
Vasari's archives are bound to his historic home in Arezzo by a culture ministry statute that makes their ownership largely symbolic.
But a lawyer representing the Festari family said the Russian buyers, a holding company called Ross Engineering, understood the papers couldn't be moved and wanted to buy them anyway.
However, a Russian lawyer claiming to represent the buyer later came forward saying that his client had died in a car crash a month before and that the deal had fallen through.
In fact, the sale never went through giving rise to speculation that documents' sale was merely a ruse to lure the government into making a competing bid far in excess of what the papers were actually worth. One such sceptic was Milan's former culture chief and prominent art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, who said that the papers, while precious, were worth ten million euros at most.
Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a series of biographies chronicling the lives and careers of Italy's Renaissance masters.
The work became a canon of western art history, overshadowing Vasari's work as a painter and architect.
A highly acclaimed mannerist painter in his time, Vasari also designed the famous loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi in Florence, one of the city's most celebrated landmarks.
