A man among men

What makes a master? Beloved of the commercial art world, handled warily by art historians, the word has long been opaque. Michael Prodger investigates its many meanings-and discovers that being male confers an unfair advantage

- Michael Prodger

IN the preface to his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari spatters his short biographies of the greatest painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance with the word 'master'. The first, in his view, was 'Nature herself", the origin of all the Arts; then came the masters of the Gothic period, who 'deserve praise and should be given recognition for what they accomplished', even if that was, in Vasari's opinion, of limited value and skill; then came the first named master, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who 'rediscovered the measurements and proportions of the ancients'. After that, he turns generic, masters coming thick and fast-ancient and modern, anonymous and named, with many of them being his near or actual contemporaries.

For Vasari, a 'master' was many things: a teacher and example; an elevated artisan from less enlightened times; an unknown Greek or Roman whose magic had been lost and rediscovered by Renaissance Italians; the head of a studio; a catch-all name for a practitioner of rare gifts; and an honorific denoting respect.

This multifariousness has continued down the years, with 'master' bandied about whenever the search for a more accurate term seems too onerous. It is a favourite expression of the commercial art world. There, an Old Master is often defined as a painter or sculptor active between 1400 and 1800, with modern masters at work from 1900. Then come contemporary masters-the Germans Gerhard Richter, say, or Anselm Kiefer-comprising those who continue to redefine the nature of art history. This timeline omits great artists such as Turner and Delacroix, Monet and Gauguin. Too young to be Old Masters and too old to be modern, they are lumped together as 19th-century masters.