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

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.