Giorgio Vasari and workshop

This entry stands for an attribution formula. It credits pictures in which Giorgio Vasari's own hand is present, in the design and in a real share of the painting, while assistants from his workshop carried out the rest. The Vatican Pinacoteca uses it, Giorgio Vasari e bottega, for one of its altarpieces. It claims more than Workshop of Giorgio Vasari, a label that leaves open whether the master touched the picture at all.

Speed was part of Vasari's method, and helpers made it possible. In 1546 he and his team painted a great hall in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the papal chancery in Rome, so fast that it is still called the Room of the Hundred Days, and Michelangelo is said to have answered the boast with it shows. Vasari later wrote a life of one of his longest-serving assistants, Cristofano Gherardi, a painter from Sansepolcro.