Knowra Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was an Italian painter, architect, and writer. His biographies of Italian artists helped establish art history as a literary genre.
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects : Giorgio Vasari’s collection of biographies of Italian artists, first published in 1550 and revised in 1568. This is the work that made Vasari a foundational writer on artists and their histories.
Uffizi Gallery : An art museum in Florence housed in a building originally designed for Florentine government offices. Vasari designed the building as part of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s administrative project.
Michelangelo : An Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet whose works include the Sistine Chapel ceiling and David. Vasari treated Michelangelo as the culmination of artistic progress in the revised Lives.
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo : An Italian painter and writer whose treatises on painting and artistic theory appeared in the late sixteenth century. Lomazzo’s systematic theory offers a different model from Vasari’s biographical history of artistic progress.
Art history : The academic study of artworks, artists, styles, institutions, and their historical contexts. Vasari’s Lives helped make artists’ lives and artistic development subjects of historical writing.
Renaissance : A period of European cultural and intellectual change, conventionally dated from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Vasari framed the artists he profiled as part of a revival of classical art.
Vasari Corridor : An elevated passage in Florence connecting the Palazzo Vecchio with the Palazzo Pitti across the Arno. Vasari designed this private route for the Medici ruler Cosimo I.
Leonardo da Vinci : An Italian Renaissance artist and engineer known for paintings including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Vasari included Leonardo among the artists whose achievements advanced painting.
Karel van Mander : A Dutch painter and writer whose Schilder-boeck, published in 1604, combined artists’ biographies with art theory. Van Mander adapted the artist-biography tradition for Northern European painters and audiences.
Biography : A factual account of a person’s life written by someone else. Vasari made artists’ lives a central structure for telling the history of art.
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