In his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. The last life in Lives of the Artists, the last word, as one might say, is that of Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), who offers a kind of apologia pro vita sua. The Italian artist, architect, and author Giorgio Vasari was an important influence on the modem Western conception of art. That is first of all a tribute to the not-often-outshone author. The work sails on, magnificently irreducible. It has even been suggested that he did not write it all himself. Dates are not his strong suit his judgments are partial and parochial he could seldom resist a good story, regardless of veracity and some of his lives have stock plots, of the master-outshone-by-the pupil variety, as Charles Nicholl has pointed out apropos Leonardo da Vinci. The author sinned, no doubt, by omission and commission. Its factual accuracy has been questioned in certain particulars it is widely held to be unreliable, not to say apocryphal. It is the founding text, the originative narrative. In art history, Vasari's work has a quasi-biblical authority. For a work first published in 1550, furnishing biographical accounts of some 160 Italian artists from Cimabue (c 1240-1302) via Giotto, Donatello, Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Raffaello and Michelangelo to Clovio (1498-1578), and running to 800,000 words, it is nothing short of miraculous. Given the shrivelled state of serious non-fiction, this is testimony to a remarkable fecundity.
Vasari's Lives - to give them their full dignity, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects - is currently available in at least four paperback editions: Dover Books, Modern Library, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics, to say nothing of an audio CD on the Naxos label.
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