Hand, maniera and manuage in The Lives by Giorgio Vasari

Abstract

The Lives by Giorgio Vasari is the most influential treatise of the Renaissance and one of the most important works in the history of art. Using historiography as a structure, biography as a method, and art criticism and theory as an object of study, he documents and fabled the history of art, as we know it today; describing theoretical, technical, procedural and aesthetics postulates of a key era. However, the work has aspects that have not been well treated. This is the case of the term “maniera” –a key concept that cuts across the work and period–, often translated as “style”. This has led to severe conceptual slippage, displacing artisticity from how it is done with the hands (maniera), to how the result of said doing (work) is judged stylistically (semiotic/linguistically). In this context and using the link between “maniera” and “manuage”, this paper reviews the centrality of manual action in The Lives; showing how the neologism manuage, 1) opens a new theoretical way to discuss and restore the aforementioned conceptual slippage; and 2) far from being new –neo–, it is the unnamed background of a seminal treatise for the Fine Arts.