The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1

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

Rating 4.5
Word count
489K words
Chapters
49

Tags

English Originals PaintingArchitecture Italian ArtPainting and SculptureArt History BiographyBiographical SourcesPortraits of ArtistsHumanismHistorical ResearchArtist BiographyTraditional AestheticsRenaissance

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.The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) by VasariAuthor: Vasari, Giorgio, 1511-1574,Language: English, Class: N: Fine Arts, Release Date: Apr 24, 2007

Editor's review

Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 is a founding work of Western art-history writing, linking the painters, sculptors and architects of the early Renaissance through a series of biographies. It preserves anecdotes about figures such as Giotto and Brunelleschi while reflecting the sixteenth-century Italian imagination of art's "rebirth." This Project Gutenberg edition is a public-domain English e-book, easy to search and carry, and a good entry point to the original art-historical text. There is no need to read it straight through: treat each life as a self-contained unit and compare it with images of the relevant works to appreciate Vasari's standards of craft and judgments of character. For researchers it is an important source for understanding later art-historical narrative frameworks; for general readers it is more like a group portrait of artists shaped by its era's prejudices, combining interest with documentary value.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the core lives—Giotto, Brunelleschi and others—first, then skip to other chapters as interest dictates.
  2. For each life, look up one or two representative works by that artist and view them alongside the text.
  3. Keep notes on the evaluative standards Vasari returns to, such as "nature," "proportion" and "rebirth."
  4. If the English is difficult, read an introductory art-history work for background first, then return to the original.

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

FAQ

Is this a complete Chinese translation? No. This entry is a public-domain English e-book released by Project Gutenberg; the text is in English and contains no Chinese translation or annotation, so some English reading ability is needed.
Can I read it without a background in art history? Yes, but it is best to start by learning about the main early Renaissance artists and basic terminology. Vasari's lives are organized by person and each stands largely on its own; reading alongside images of the works and background material lowers the threshold considerably.
Why is the book so full of praise for artists? Vasari was himself a painter and architect, and his writing has a clear period stance: it aims to show Italian art's progress from decline to "rebirth." Readers should treat it as tendentious historical source material rather than neutral, objective modern art history.

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.