Allegory of Sleep 1565 - 1575

Giorgio Vasari made this circular drawing, Allegory of Sleep, in pen and brown ink with brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on paper in Italy. This study for a dish imagines sleep as a goddess, carefully placing a cloth over the head of a sleeping figure while putti hover above, holding tablets. Vasari was an important figure in the history of art, not so much for his paintings as for his writing. His *Lives of the Artists* established a new kind of biographical approach to art history. The drawing has its roots in Renaissance humanism, where classical mythology provided artists with allegorical figures. Dishware of this kind would have been collected and displayed, demonstrating the owner’s learning and discernment. Here, Vasari uses disegno, or drawing, to elevate the status of the artist and the intellectual value of the design process. To understand Vasari and his time better, we can study archival documents, commissioned inventories, and the artist's own writings. Approaching art in this way shows us how its meaning is always tied to specific social conditions and the institutions that enable it.