Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari (b. 1511–d. 1574) was an Italian painter, architect, poet, and biographer whose writings helped to shape the canon and discipline of Western European art history—to the point that often he is described as the first art historian. Born into an artisan family in Arezzo, Vasari received a humanist education and trained in Arezzo and Florence as a painter and goldsmith. He is best known as the author of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1st edition, 1550; 2nd edition, 1568), which he dedicated to Florence’s Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. In this multivolume collection of artist biographies, Vasari presented the history of art and architecture as a progressive series of qualitative peaks and valleys and championed the art of his own time, especially that produced by artists and architects from his native region of Tuscany. Vasari himself was a prolific painter and architect whose patrons included popes, heads of state, leading intellects, and religious institutions. Among his most famous projects are the historical, allegorical, and mythological paintings he and his workshop executed for Cosimo I in Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria and the construction of the adjacent Uffizi to house municipal offices. In keeping with Catholic Reformation–era tastes, Vasari oversaw the renovation and redecoration of several medieval churches, including the Pieve in Arezzo and Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce in Florence. In 1563 he helped to found the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, the first art academy. Vasari’s work also included painting ritual objects such as processional banners for local confraternities and devising ephemeral artistic schemes that included temporary decorations erected in honor of imperial visits, aristocratic weddings and baptisms, and the iconographical program for Michelangelo’s funeral of 1564. When Vasari died in Florence in 1574, he left incomplete the monumental Last Judgment he had begun to fresco in the cupola of Florence Cathedral. His remains were transported to Arezzo, where he was buried in the Pieve at the foot of a large, double-sided altar he made to serve as his family’s funerary chapel. Vasari’s life and works are amply documented in primary sources, including his own writings, and the secondary literature on his work is vast. The latter primarily concerns the Lives of the Artists and, although the amount of scholarship on his paintings and architecture has increased in recent years, much remains to be explored about those aspects of this exceptionally enterprising artist’s career.