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58 Confronting Images‘‘Most humble servant’’ and ‘‘most indebted servant’’ of the Medici:10 Vasari opens his great work with a double bid of humility andpraise. The humility of a courtier and artist-functionary: since he offersthe whole of his labor to the prince, ‘‘sole father, sole lord, andsole protector of these our arts’’; since he reduces his ‘‘rough labor’’(rozza fatica) as official painter to take up the pen, the better to exaltthe ‘‘the greatness and the truly royal magnificence’’ of Cosimo’s‘‘mind.’’ 11 But in so doing, he opens a rich theater of praise, one inwhich at the end of the day he will find his role. It exalts the Mediciline and Cosimo’s ‘‘most illustrious ancestors,’’ in whose footstepsCosimo has followed by protecting the arts (seguendo in ciò l’orme degliillustrissimi Suoi progenitori). 12 It also exalts the city, the Florentia ofmythic origin of which two putti, in the 1550 frontispiece, reveal astylized view. Now the city of Florence also stands, metonymously,for its inhabitants, in particular the famous ones who had made itsplendid: its artists. Shortly before 1400, Filippo Villani already includedCimabue and Giotto in the list of uomini famosi in his Chronicle,and Landino, in 1482, placed at the head of his monumental editionof the Divine Comedy a text praising Florence and its great men. Vasari—himselfa Tuscan painter—only gave the usual dedicatory expressionof communal pride dimensions worthy of a prodigious bookof history. 13The second legitimation procedure appears clearly in the 1568 edition,which thanks to the considerable success of the first one was acomplete reworking, incorporating, in addition to a series of woodcutartists’ portraits, a significant number of new biographies de’ vivi et demorti dall’anno 1550 infino al 1567 14 —the last of which is none other thanthe autobiography of the painter-historian himself . . . This return tosquare one in 1568 tells us much about what was at stake in thisedition: for Vasari, it was a question of appealing to the constitution ofa social body, a social body already ennobled by the historical operationof the book, but also by the creation in 1563 of the Florentine Academyof the Arti del disegno, which definitively consecrated the artist’s métieras a ‘‘liberal art,’’ setting it apart from the medieval guilds and theworld of servile craftsmen. 15 In 1568, then, Vasari complemented hisdedication to the prince with another dedication Agli artefici del dis-