The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

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The Lives also convey much about Vasari himself and his outstanding abilities as a critic inspired by his passion for art. About Vasari himself we know an extraordinary amount, not only from his own writings—in the edition of 1568 he included an explanation of his own life and works—but also from surviving materials that document his life at the court of Cosimo I and his eventful exchanges with so many of the patrons and literati of the period. I confess it’s a little tough to read through some sections of this book, as Vasari has a tendency to abbreviate the actual lives of these artists and describes their work one piece after another in detail, so I skimmed at times. the traditional definition of Renaissance art as the humanistic innovations of Florentine and Roman artists, to which Giorgio Vasari's Vite (1550, 1568) gave rise. Great men, and their immortal works, are brought vividly to life, as Vasari depicts the young Giotto scratching his first drawings on stone; Donatello gazing at Brunelleschi's crucifix; and Michelangelo's painstaking work on the Sistine Chapel, harassed by the impatient Pope Julius II.

An essential and highly pleasurable record of the era, it also amounts to a sprawling, lifelong investigation into what it means to be an artist. 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" (in regards to Vasari's life of Nicola Pisano), while acknowledging that, despite these shortcomings, it is one of the basic sources for information on the Renaissance in Italy.

As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Among his better-known pupils or followers are Sebastiano Flori, Bartolomeo Carducci, Mirabello Cavalori (Salincorno), Stefano Veltroni (of Monte San Savino), and Alessandro Fortori (of Arezzo). It was interesting to read that Vasari describes several of the artists as having been unteachable and wild in their youth, to the despair of their parents, who then palmed them off on nearby goldsmiths or artist studios, and the rest is history.

Despite the ease with which we merge the figure of Warhol with today’s entertainment-obsessed society, there is little interpretation of the relationship between his construction of his persona and its direct impact on his art. Having initially solicited her involvement in Made in Heaven, their collaboration fast turned into a real-life love affair and marriage.Da Vinci painting Mona Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and while doing so, “employing singers and musicians or jesters to keep her face full of merriment and so chase away the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits. This is a "meta-book", which stitches together separate files elsewhere on the Web as they appeared in a previously published book. Vasari's term, applied to the change in artistic styles with the work of Giotto, eventually would become the French term Renaissance (rebirth) widely applied to the era that followed. The best way [to be informed about Leonardo and his contemporaries] will be to read their Lives, done by Vasari. Any crafts person, including those of us in technology is likely to find this touching and inspirational.

The greatest gifts are often seen, in the course of nature, rained by celestial influences on human creatures; and sometimes, in supernatural fashion, beauty, grace, and talent are united beyond measure in one single person, in a manner that to whatever such an one turns his attention, his every action is so divine, that, surpassing all other men, it makes itself clearly known as a thing bestowed by God (as it is), and not acquired by human art. Here he chooses nineteen of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. His relentless pursuit of pleasure was not only publicly acknowledged, but it surfaced in his work, as well as in that of other artists. Working for the Zoli modelling agency (available for “special bookings only”), Warhol sold his celebrity to various companies for product endorsements in television and print, giving a sense of inevitability to his early Pop appropriations of such banal products as Brillo scrubbing pads and Campbell’s soup. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The volume contains an index of names and objects mentioned, [16] and subsequently a list of illustrations, and finally an index of places and their buildings also with references to the passages where they are mentioned in the text. The inevitable intertwining of an artist’s colourful biography and aesthetic genius has provided fodder for scholarly speculation, populist fascination and plain, old-fashioned entertainment. Of course, it can get boring at times when reading of an artist you never heard about and going through long passages on his work, and from what I understand, this edited version doesn’t even include all the artists he wrote about.