Gior-gio...

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I had been intending to expand on the post of the twenty-first, this week, so the night before last I took out my recent replacement copy of Giorgio Vasari's 'The Lives of the Artists [my original, ancient paperback, which I can no longer find: it was seriously knackered anyway, being nearly fifty years old], to dig out some reference material for a piece on the often chaotic backgrounds that underpin the lives of great artists and their output. However, eventually I thought that Caravaggio would make a good central figure for the piece and around whom to hang the theme of brilliance issuing forth from chaos: but of course, Caravaggio was only three years old when Vasari died. Anyway, the book was still on my desk when yesterday, the summer edition of The New Statesman dropped through the letterbox. I opened it up, only to find they had run a piece on Vasari: 'The Inventor of the Renaissance', and they had illustrated it with a photo of the self-same painting pictured on the cover of my recently-taken-down-from-the-shelves copy: Vasari's St. Luke painting the Virgin, ca. 1565. Call it coincidence, serendipity or happenstance; whatever, it was one of those moments: it certainly made me smile, anyway...

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