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Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
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The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, or Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "one of the founding texts in art history".
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Encyclopedia
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, or Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "one of the founding texts in art history". The title is often abridged to the Vite or the Lives.
Background
As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari's work was first published in 1550 by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence, and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).
The work has a consistent and notorious favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view. John Symonds claimed in 1899 that "It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions.", while acknowledging that despite these shortcomings, it is one of the basic sources for information on the Renaissance in Italy.
Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, although likely inventions. Others are generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and the immediately preceding one. Modern criticism—with all the new materials opened up by research—has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. The work is widely considered a classic even today, though it is widely agreed that it must be supplemented by modern critical research.
Vasari includes a 42 page sketch of his own biography at the end of his Vite, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati.
Influence
Vasari's Vite has been described as "by far the most influential single text for the history of Renaissance art" and "the most important work of Renaissance biography of artists". Its influence is situated mainly in three domains: as an example for contemporary and later biographers and art historians, as a defining factor in the view on the Renaissance and the role of Florence and Rome in it, and as a major source of information on the lives and works of early Italian artists.
The Vite have been translated wholly or partially into many languages, including English, Dutch, German and French.
Flood of artist biographies
The Vite started a wave of artist biographies. Other, mainly 17th century biographers often were called the Vasari of their country. Karel Van Mander in the Netherlands was probably the first Vasarian author with his Het Schilderboeck (The Painters' Book) from 1604, the first comprehensive list of biographies of painters from the Low Countries. Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), author of Deutsche Akademie, was known as the "German Vasari". In England, Aglionby's Painting Illustrated from 1685 was largely based on Vasari as well.
View of the Renaissance
The Vite is also important as the basis for discussions on the development of style, It influenced the view art historians had of the Early Renaissance for a long time, placing too much emphasis on the achievements of Florentian and Roman artists while ignoring those of the rest of Italy and certainly the artists from the rest of Europe.
Source of information
Finally, it has also been for centuries the most important source for info on Early Renaissance Italian (and especially Tuscan) painters and the attribution of their paintings. In 1899, an author like John Addington Symonds used the Vite as one of his basic sources for the description of artists in his 7 books on Renaissance in Italy., and nowadays it is still, despite its obvious biases and shortcomings, the basis for the biography of many artists like Leonardo da Vinci.
Contents
The Vite contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names, which are sometimes used in different ways. The following list respects the order of the book, as divided into its three parts. The book starts with a dedication to Cosimo de' Medici and a preface, and then starts with technical and background texts about architecture, sculpture, and painting. A second preface follows, introducing the actual "Vite" in parts 2 to 5. What follows is the complete list from the second (1568) edition. In a few cases, different very short biographies were given in one section.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Copies of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists Online
- Website created by Adrienne DeAngelis. Currently incomplete, intended to be unabridged, in English.
- 1550 Unabridged, original Italian.
- Translated by E L Seeley, 1908. Abridged, in English.
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