Lontano dagli occhi: il pezzo mancante della "machina grandissima" di Giorgio Vasari

The essay tells the story of a wooden relief representing The Supper in the house of the Pharisee, which was lost trace of for more than a century, and recently found by the authors. Stored in warehouses of the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome, and never noticed, the piece is one of the surviving parts of the monumental altarpiece of Giorgio Vasari, realized between 1567 and 1569, under the commission of Pius V for the church of the Holy Cross in Bosco Marengo (Alessandria, Piedmont), birthplace of the Pope, for which he wanted the best artists of the time. Vasari oversaw the realization not only of the painting but also of the sculpture, even the enormous wooden structure, creating the most monumental altarpiece of his long career. This complex work of painting, sculpture and architecture was, according to various sources, including Vasari’s description in his Lives of the Artists, of startling visual impact. The altarpiece was disassembled around 1710; what the work actually looked like when finished is impossible for us to know with certainty, so we can only hypothesize its original appearance and composition. The rediscovery of the missing piece has been an opportunity to reconsider an important artwork which had been forgotten during the recent celebration of the 500th anniversary of Vasari’s birth, and to tie his name to wooden sculpture, a material that he derided as inferior, but that he used as the principal medium in one of his most interesting works.