Lives of the Artists Volume I

Cimabue watching the young Giotto scratching his first drawings on a stone; Donatello gaping at Brunelleschi’s Crucifix; Michelangelo ‘altering’ the nose of the David to fool Soderini.

Vasari (1511- 1574) was himself a painter, but he is really remembered for these biographies which begin with Cimabue and Giotto in the late thirteenth century and trace the developments in Italian art down to the golden epoch of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian. Included are Vasari’s reflections on the state of contemporary Florentine art – its philosophy and its aims – which lend considerable historical and critical value to a work which has been tremendously popular since its first edition in 1550.