Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 07

Vasari, Giorgio, 1511-1574Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
550K words
Chapters
55

Tags

English Originals Artists Painting and SculptureArt HistoryBiographical SketchesLives of ArtistsGroup BiographyHumanistic CareTraditional AestheticsFlorenceRenaissance

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 07 (of 10)Author: Vasari, Giorgio, 1511-1574,Language: English, Class: N: Fine Arts, Release Date: Mar 31, 2010

Editor's review

This is Volume 7 of the English translation of Vasari's ten-volume Lives, part of a foundational document of art history. Its value lies not in modern standards of rigorous scholarship but in the insider's view of Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects: biography, anecdote and judgment intertwine, offering both historical material and art-critical judgments that later generations kept citing. Volume 7 follows the format of the whole work, letting readers see how Vasari organizes artists' lives and evaluates stylistic development. Read it as a hybrid of source material and literature: note the rumors and details it preserves, but also be alert to its bias and period limitations. Suitable for selected reading in art history courses, for museum staff seeking background, or for readers with a basic interest in the Renaissance who read slowly. The English translation is fluent and the public-domain e-edition is easy to search by person and work, but it should not be the sole authoritative source.

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Reading tips

  1. Start with this volume's table of contents, choose entries on artists you know for close reading, then return to Vasari's evaluative framework.
  2. Keep a map of Renaissance Italy and a chart of personal relationships at hand, marking places and artistic lineages as you read.
  3. Compare the anecdotes in the biographies with later art-historical accounts, distinguishing source material from Vasari's bias.
  4. Read one or two lives a day; avoid reading straight through and overloading on names and works.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55

FAQ

Can I read Volume 7 without having read the first six? Yes. Each volume is organized by artist, and Volume 7's entries are relatively self-contained, so direct reading is not completely broken. But Vasari's overall view of stylistic development runs through the whole work; to understand his evaluative thread, at least skim the preface to Volume 1 or learn the overall structure.
How difficult is the English of this translation? The translation belongs to an earlier English biographical style, with long sentences and dense names and places, but it is generally readable. Readers with university-level English can manage with a dictionary; if the Renaissance background is unfamiliar, start with a concise introduction to art history.
Can Vasari's accounts be cited directly as historical fact? Not as the sole historical fact. Vasari had much first-hand material, but he also mixed in rumor, exaggeration and personal preference, and some dates and attributions are disputed. Check modern scholarship when citing, and treat him as an important but critically used primary source.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Vasari, Giorgio, 1511-1574 Author

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was an Italian painter and architect of the Renaissance, and is best known to posterity as a writer on art history. This library holds 11 of his works, chiefly various volumes of The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, including Volume 1 and Volumes 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. The work presents biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects one by one, describing their lives and creations while commenting on artistic techniques and the tastes of the age. It is regarded as a founding work of Western art-historical writing and offers a precious and far-reaching source for understanding Renaissance art. Its style combines documentary detail with critical judgment; the narrative is vivid and the portraits are distinct, and despite anecdotes and personal bias it has long served as a basic text for studying the art of the period. Public information about the details of his life is limited, so no further elaboration is given here.