A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of Arezzo’s history, particularly as it pertains to Vasari and his family, as well as that of the Pieve prior to Vasari’s interventions there. It then considers an initiative Vasari and Bishop of Arezzo Bernardetto Minerbetti devised to reconfigure the east end of Arezzo Cathedral in the 1550s that in part inspired his renovation of the Pieve. It concludes with an extended discussion of Vasari’s acquisition of patronage rights to the St. Mustiola chapel in the Pieve’s left aisle and his graphic designs for the chapel he intended to build there.

The focus of this chapter is monumental, freestanding altar Vasari built after his patronage rights shifted from the St. Mustiola chapel to the Pieve’s high chapel in 1560. Consecrated in 1564, the high altar was the first and largest of Vasari’s four chapels for the Pieve. This chapter considers its history and design and materiality and precedents, as well as its multiple functions as a high altar, a relic altar, a sacrament tabernacle, and, to a lesser extent, Vasari’s family funerary chapel.

The altars Vasari built in the Pieve for the Aretine lawyer Onofrio (Nofri) Camaiani and the important local confraternity known as the Fraternita dei Laici count among his least known commissions. Both altar tabernacles were destroyed, and the Camaiani Altarpiece was removed along with the other works of art in the Pieve during the church’s renovation in the nineteenth century. There was no Vasari altarpiece to relocate from the Fraternita’s chapel, for although he designed the architectural aedicule that was to hold it, Vasari failed to complete its altarpiece before he died in 1574. This chapter substantially expands our understanding of the patronage, history, precedents, original appearance, and iconography of those altars. Despite their differences, the Camaiani and Fraternita altars were important elements of Vasari’s artistic and architectural vision for the Pieve and integral parts of its Marian decorative program.

This introduction establishes a foundation for the chapters that follow by providing an overview of Vasari’s work at Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo and the state of the research on the topic. It also maps out the structure of the book, identifies the methodologies and primary and secondary source material upon which it is based, and establishes its contribution to the literature on Vasari and the history of Italian Renaissance art.