Recommendations from our site
“With Vasari, we begin thinking that artistic biography might matter. As much as we may want to resist the notion that biography is central to understanding art, it seems as though it is just inevitable – the life of the artist is an inevitable element in considering the art itself, as Vasari realised early on.” Read more...
“He invented art history as we know it…..Much of what we know, especially about the personal lives of the artists, comes from Vasari because there are no other sources. He got it from gossip and hearsay. That is how he did much of his research: by asking people who knew them or by asking somebody whose father had worked with them.” Read more...
Kenneth Bartlett, Historian
Our most recommended books
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The Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari -
The Book of the Courtier
by Baldesar Castiglione -
Art and Fear
by David Bayles & Ted Orland -
Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
by Rudolf Wittkower -
Vision and Art
by Margaret Livingstone -
The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany
by Michael Baxandall
