The Artistic Terminology in the Russian Translations of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite. The case of the word ‘disegno’

Abstract

In the present article the author analyzes the many different meanings of the word ‘disegno’ in Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1568), in particular the instances found in the Introduction to the Three Arts of Sculpture, Painting and Architecture, and investigates the different ways in which they are translated into Russian. The author concludes that the considerable complexity and semantic breadth of the Italian word ‘disegno’, an extremely relevant concept in Vasari’s text, does not correspond to a single term equally rich in meanings in Russian. However, the richness of Russian and the skills of the translator ‘compensate’ for this dissimilarity and aptly render the word ‘disegno’ within the many different contexts in which it is used.