Vite de' più Eccellenti Pittori Scultori e Architetti..

A most attractive late-18th-century edition of Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, in fine contemporary calf bindings. This edition includes 159 engraved plates, providing portraits for each of the artists included in Vasari's monumental work, along with three special folding plates to accompany the life of Michelangelo. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) remains the pre-eminent biographer of the Italian Renaissance. A talented artist and architect in his own right, Vasari enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Florentine Medici family. He turned his talents to recording the lives of great artists (including his contemporaries in Florence) and by so doing created a new genre.

Vasari's biographies are both informative and intriguing - by combining fact and anecdote with a good measure of gossip he successfully offered his readers intimate insights within an engaging narrative. An experienced artist himself, Vasari introduced enlightened aesthetic and technical criticism throughout his biographies, a significant fact given that the wider public had limited access to the artworks themselves. Vasari's Lives played an important role in disseminating information and promoting Italian artists as celebrities across Europe, and has become the basis of much subsequent scholarship of the Italian Renaissance.