Oxford World's Classics: Lives of the Artist

This is a new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics, of a work that has influenced the visual imagination of generations of art lovers. The book represents one of the most important contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari's collections of biographical accounts are filled with facts, attributions, and anecdotes about hundreds of artists, ranging from the greatest figures (Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo) to those known today only to the specialist. While the work has been read for centuries as background to the period's art, it also contains a highly influential theory of the development of Renaissance art. Vasari viewed the late 13th and 14th centuries, represented by Cimabue and Giotto, as the infancy of art, followed by a period of youthful vigour, shaped by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, and subsequently by the mature period of perfection, dominated by the titanic figures of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. It was Vasari who invented the term "rebirth" in discussing the period's artistic production, and he is thus indirectly responsible for the use of the term Renaissance as a period style. This edition contains a new translation of 36 of the most important lives.