Life Of Raphael (Lives of the Artists) - Softcover

Vasari's Lives is the Bible of Italian Renaissance - if not all - art history ... our fullest guide to how people looked at art in the Renaissance; David Ekserdjian, Professor of Art and Film History, University of London

Raphael (1483-1520) was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by the Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari and first published in 1550. Vasari's Lives of the Painters was the first attempt to write a systematic history of Italian art. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael's own art - whose development and chronology Vasari describes in detail, together with the spectacular social career of the first painter to be mooted, it was claimed, as a Cardinal - but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues.