Lorenzi Ghiberti e Giovan Battista Gelli tra autobiografia e biografia

This article assesses the hypothesis suggested some thirty years ago by English art historian Peter Murray of the possibility that Florentine Renaissance writer Giovan Battista Gelli may have used a now lost copy of Ghiberti’s Commentaries (different from the only surviving manuscript) to compose his short life of this artist in his Vite d’artisti fiorentini. To appraise Murray’s theory, this essay compares Gelli’s concise biography of Ghiberti not only with the latter’s autobiograhy in Book II of the Commentaries but also with early sixteenth-century texts such as Antonio Billi’s Libro, the so-called Anonimo Magliabechiano, and Vasari’s Lives.