Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects
Volume 1
Giorgio Vasari 1550 CE
This first volume presents early Italian artists through biographies and stories about their work. Its account of Giotto begins with a shepherd boy drawing sheep on a stone.
285 pages 5h 32m reading time
- Often called the first real history of art, it is still a basic source for the Italian Renaissance.
- Argues that art had declined after ancient Rome and was reborn in Italy, growing better step by step from Cimabue and Giotto toward the great masters of Vasari's own time.
- Treats painters, sculptors, and architects as gifted individuals whose lives and talents are worth recording, not just as skilled workers.
- Its idea of art being "reborn" (rinascita) helped give us the word and the idea of the Renaissance as a period in history.
- Its life stories, its way of ranking artists, and its pattern of steady progress shaped how art history was written and taught for centuries.
Inspired at a dinner
Vasari said the idea came at a cardinal's dinner, where friends talked about writing the lives of artists.
A murder that never happened
Vasari wrote that one painter murdered another, but records show the "victim" outlived his supposed killer.
Only one living artist
The first version covered only dead artists, with one exception: Michelangelo, whom Vasari deeply admired.
Rewritten and greatly expanded
Eighteen years later, Vasari published a much bigger version that added living artists and woodcut portraits.
Translated from Italian by Gaston du C. de Vere