Le origini della didattica teorica della
Storia dell’arte tra Giorgio Vasari e
Vincenzio Borghini nell’Accademia del
Disegno
Enrico Sartoni
This essay traces the prehistory of art-historical pedagogy to the founding of the Accademia del Disegno
in Florence (1563), arguing that its true intellectual architects were Vincenzo Borghini and Giorgio Vasari
rather than Cosimo I de’ Medici, who merely granted its statutory sanction. Drawing on the Academy’s
early statutes (1563), the essay shows how provisions requiring the compilation of biographies and
portrait friezes of eminent artists translated Vasari’s project in the Vite into an institutional mechanism for
preserving artistic memory across generations. By linking the Academy’s pedagogical mission — teaching
saper fare, saper vedere, and saper essere — to a historical and philological dimension inherited from
Borghini’s classical scholarship, the essay locates the origins of art-historical teaching well before the
eighteenth-century Academies traditionally credited with this role.