A man among men

What makes a master? Beloved of the commercial art world, handled warily by art historians, the word has long been opaque. Michael Prodger investigates its many meanings–and discovers that being male confers an unfair advantage

IN the preface to his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari spatters his short biographies of the greatest painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance with the word ‘master’. The first, in his view, was ‘Nature herself’, the origin of all the Arts; then came the masters of the Gothic period, who ‘deserve praise and should be given recognition for what they accomplished’, even if that was, in Vasari’s opinion, of limited value and skill; then came the first named master, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who ‘rediscovered the measurements and proportions of the ancients’. After that, he turns generic, masters coming thick and fast—ancient and modern, anonymous and named, with many of them being his near or actual contemporaries. ‘For Vasari, a “master” was many things, a teacher, an artisan, an…

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Country Life (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 12, 2025

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