Hiroko Takahashi

St Luke the Evangelist, also the patron of painters, was often shown portraying the Virgin and Child in 15th and 16th-century Netherlandish altarpieces. In Italy, by contrast, the first extant work of this type appeared only around 1570, when Vasari painted the subject in the chapel of the artists' association in Florence. But the significance of Vasari's innovation has not been recognised, and the picture itself has been little regarded even by specialists, who have considered it to be dependent on a St Luke ascribed to Raphael as well as on Northern antecedents. The so-called Raphael, however, was recently attributed instead to Federico Zuccaro, a close follower of Vasari. And the features of Vasari's painting that might appear to derive from Northern precedents are actually explicable otherwise.Nevertheless, Vasari's interest in the subject may have been stimulated by his acquaintance in Rome with the Netherlandish artist Maerten van Heemskerck, who had painted a masterly St Luke for the painters' guild in Haarlem just before leaving for Italy. Italian Renaissance artists were eager to improve their intellectual status, traditionally much lower than that of poets or scholars, and Vasari's Lives of the Artists was one of the most important schemes for realising this goal. In the recent scholarly literature, the popularity of the theme of St Luke among Netherlandish artists has been connected to similar aspirations. Viewed in this light, Vasari's St Luke can be regarded as an assimilation of that self-assertion in visual terms by the foremost representative of the verbal alternative.