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.

Nearly thirty sculpted and painted images decorate Vasari’s high altar for the Pieve. The subjects of some of its paintings relate to saints whose relics were kept in its crypt, whereas that of others was tied to the dedication of the Pieve and local devotions, as well as to the Eucharist that was stored in its sacrament tabernacle. Still others depicted name saints and portraits of Vasari and his family members. This chapter comprises the first systematic analysis of each of the Pieve altar’s images and how they relate to each other, as well as to the altar’s multiple functions and some of Vasari’s other sacred works. It demonstrates the care that went into the conception and execution of Vasari’s high chapel and funerary monument and sets the stage for its contextualization with the other altars and paintings he made for the Pieve, as well as its afterlife as Vasari’s place of burial.

This chapter explores the degree to which Vasari designed his Pieve altars to integrate, alter, or reproduce the liturgical and artistic precedents in the Romanesque church. It evinces a surprising level of stylistic, iconographical, and functional harmony between them and other works in the Pieve—an early sixteenth-century Madonna of Mercy altarpiece in particular. The conception and creation of Vasari’s altars for the Pieve was nowhere near as carefully orchestrated as it was for his better known Medici-sponsored church renovations in Florence, but this chapter shows that his gradual transformation of the Pieve’s interior constituted an important precedent and counterpart to those better-known Florentine projects.

Prior to the Pieve’s radical renovation in the nineteenth century, Vasari’s Albergotti altarpiece decorated an altar at the end of the church’s left aisle. Its main panel depicts the Coronation of the Virgin and was originally commissioned by the Florentine Filippo Salviati for the church of San Vincenzo in Prato. This chapter investigates that early commission and the painting’s subsequent purchase by the Aretine lawyer Nerozzo Albergotti, thus providing a deeper understanding of the Albergotti altarpiece’s conception and complicated patronage history, as well as of its iconography and the ways in which Vasari adapted it to the altar in the Pieve on which it was installed.