Vasari's "Patience": The Measure of Time
Liana De Girolamy Cheney
Umass Lowell
Giorgio Vasari's interest in the theme of the "Patience"
extended to and incorporated the classical and medieval texts. In the Psychomachia,
Prudentius carefully studied the attitudes of these type of tormented spirits,
as demonstrated in the writings of Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of
the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, and Jennifer O'Reilly, Studies in
the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages. According
to Katzenellenbogen, allegorical representations combine an interweaving
thoughts of mental images with actual forms and convey a spiritual message.
Vasari's "Patience" clearly illustrates this concept. Ripa's third emblem
of Patiencedescribes in great part Vasari's "Patience" as a woman who carefully
watches the dropping of water symbolizing that the individual needs to
wait for things to material and achieve happiness aswell as the passing
of time.
The purposes of this study is to demonstrate:1)
how sixteenth-century artists in Italy, Giorgio Vasari in particular, employed
emblem books for aesthetic, moral, and philosophical concerns; 2) Specifically,
how he used the technology of its period (astrolabe, waterclock and armillary
sphere) to personify time; 3) and, how Giorgio Vasari's paintings and writings
clearly embody these humanistic issues, and absorb the emblematic tradition
reflecting the cultural milieu of the time as exemplified in Vasari's several
versions of the personification of Patience during 1530 and 1554.