The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018 Books and arts 7112 send in combat troops. Lansdale returned
for an ineffectual stint as an adviser from
1965-68, but for Mr Boot, overthrowing
Diem was the critical mistake that ended
any chance of a viable South Vietnam—
one Lansdale would not have made.
Here, Mr Boot is wrong. Diem was a
genuine Vietnamese leader, but he was
also rigid and vindictive, relying on a nar-
row Catholic power base. By 1963 he was
pointlessly cracking down on Buddhists,
whose monks set themselves on fire in
protest. His own pilots tried to kill him by
bombing the presidential palace. Few his-
torians think he could have saved the
south. As for Lansdale, while he grasped
the centrality of politics in fighting insur-
gencies, he was prone to wacky secret-
agent schemes. A congressional investiga-
tion into CIA misconduct in 1975, after his
retirement, uncovered a proposal he once
made to undermine Fidel Castro by having
navy ships fire special shells to make Cu-
bans think that Christ had returned. It also
accused him of condoningassassination.
Mr Boot seems to have grown less
gung-ho since 2001, and he acknowledges
that South Vietnam might have fallen no
matter what America did. But his claim
that Lansdale’s strategies represent a “road
not taken” is unconvincing. Counter-insur-
gency was tried, by Lansdale and others in
Vietnam—including figures such as John
Paul Vann and Creighton Abrams, who
have featured in their own what-if books.
It was tried again, in Afghanistan and Iraq,
by officers like General McMaster and Da-
vid Petraeus. The road has been taken. It is
tortuous and exhausting, and it is not clear
that it leads anywhere. 7
T
OWARDS the end of his life Michelan-
gelo Buonarroti, the most famous artist
of the Italian Renaissance, began burning
his drawings. He did not consider them
works of art in their own right so much as
pictorial scaffolding. They aided the diffi-
cult process of deciding what a painting or
sculpture would look like when it was fin-
ished and demonstrated his very real
struggles to achieve aesthetic perfection.
By eliminating these drawings he wanted
posterity, when thinking of the great Mi-
chelangelo, to be confronted with a tower-
ing figure of insurmountable genius, one
as cold and stiff as the marble he workedwith—in short, a man who conjured up the
great masterpieces in Western art with
minimal effort.
That people can see behind this façade
is due to the timely intervention of another
influential figure of the Renaissance: Gior-
gio Vasari (1511-74), a painter, architect and
author, who saved many drawings from
the artist’s purge. Safeguarding the legacy
of those around him, as well as that of their
predecessors, became Vasari’s obsession.
In 1550 he published hismagnum opus,
“Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects”. In it he records
the many flaws, rivalries, vices and eccen-
tricities that together create a family photo-
graph of the Quattrocento and Cinquecen-
to. Vasari pulls his subjects down off their
artistic pedestals, and sketches in charac-
teristics that are all too human. Masaccio
was absent-minded. Filippo Lippi had an
insatiable libido despite being a monk.
Paolo Uccello once fled from his work
when served cheese.
In “The Collector of Lives”, an insightful
and gripping new book about Vasari, In-
grid Rowland and Noah Charney avoid
the endless debate over which of the biog-
rapher’s stories are true orfalse. Instead,
they focus on what has been included in
the biography as a way of learning more
about Vasari himself.
Thus a suspiciously melodramatic
story of Leonardo da Vinci dying in the
arms of King Francis I of France, bitterly la-
menting his own lack of devotion to his art,
reveals more about Vasari’s attitude to
work than Leonardo’s. Vasari achieved
contemporary fame and wealth by his rig-
orous work ethic. His ability to stick to
deadlines often exhausted him, butit en-
sured a steady stream of important com-
missions from the Medici and the papacy.
Shrugging off taunts from jealous rivals
about his short stature, Vasari created work
across the Italian peninsula that was lau-
ded by contemporaries and made him as
celebrated as manyof the artists he wrote
about. His unattractive appearance maywell be the reason, the authors believe,
that Vasari championed the similarly
plain-looking Giotto and Brunelleschi, re-
minding the reader that “lumps of earth of-
ten conceal veins of gold.”
Ms Rowland and Mr Charney draw a
panoramic view of the art-world during
the Renaissance, placing Vasari at the cen-
tre. He went to great lengths to preserve
pieces of scrap paper. They contained
sketches by Michelangelo, and he deemed
them valuable. This was a time when art-
ists were traditionally anonymous, unedu-
cated craftsmen of “pretty things”. By prio-
ritising the creators themselves over what
they created, championing their deeds and
elevating their status, Vasari helped lay the
foundations for art history as well for how
art is understood today. This is an impor-
tant book and long awaited. The authors
have done a commendable job of return-
ing to his rightful place the man who inflat-
ed the reputation of art and artistsso suc-
cessfully that he himself was squeezed out
of the picture. 7Art historyThe first artists’
biographer
The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and
the Invention of Art.By Ingrid Rowland and
Noah Charney. Norton; 432 pages; $29.95
and £23.99Vasari made craftsmen into starsI
N HER post-war childhood beside the
Rhine, the narrator of Esther Kinsky’s
third novel learns that “every river is a bor-
der.” Flowing water both divides and con-
nects city and country, past and present.
The “liminal habitat” that runs through
“River” is the Lea: a tributary of the
Thames that snakes its marshy, scruffy way
through to north-east London. Tramping
these post-industrial zones of makeshiftNew fictionA river runs
through it
River.By Esther Kinsky. Translated by Iain
Galbraith. Fitzcarraldo; 368 pages; £12.99. To
be published in America this autumn by
Transit BooksEsther Kinsky goes with history’s flow