Bondanella Julia Conaway - ˜Theœ lives of the artists

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS

GIORGIO VASARI (151174) was born in Arezzo, a town in central Italy. He was apprenticed at an early age to Michelangelo in Florence and became an ardent follower and admirer of his masters style. While in Florence, Vasari worked in the shops of Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli and studied with members of the Medici family, establishing a relationship with the ruling class of what would eventually become the Grand Duchy of Tuscany that would endure throughout Vasaris life. In 154950 the first Torrentino edition of the Lives appeared. While Vasari continued to work on the second and definitive edition of the Lives after 1563, he also initiated a number of important architectural projects in Tuscany, designing the Uffizi Palace and remodelling Pisas Piazza dei Cavalieri, as well as becoming a major force behind the foundation of the Florentine Academy of Design. He was also involved in remodelling the churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce in Florence as well as decorating the ceiling of the Sala Grande in Florences Palazzo Vecchio. Finally, in 1568, the second revised and enlarged Giuntina edition of his Lives appeared. It was praised by Vasaris contemporaries and quickly became the single most important secondary source in the history of Italian Renaissance art, containing not only a wealth of facts and attributions but entertaining anecdotes about the private lives of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance.

JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA is Associate Director of the Honors Division at Indiana University. She is the author of Petrarchs Dream Visions and Their Renaissance Analogues; co-editor of The Macmillan Dictionary of Italian Literature; co-editor and co-translator of The Italian Renaissance Reader; and translator and co-editor of Rousseaus Political Writings.

PETER BONDANELLA is Professor of Italian at Indiana University, where he teaches Renaissance literature and cinema, and Director of the Center for Italian Studies. He is the author of Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History, Francesco Guicciardini, and Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present; editor of Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism; co-editor of The Macmillan Dictionary of Italian Literature; co-translator of The Portable Machiavelli, The Decameron; and editor and co-translator with Julia Conaway Bondanella of Machiavellis The Prince and Discourses on Livy (Oxford Worlds Classics).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

GIORGIO VASARI

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA
and
PETER BONDANELLA

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Translation and editorial material Julia Conaway
Bondanella and Peter Bondanella 1991

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1991
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Vasari, Giorgio, 15111574.
[Vita depi eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani.
English. Selections]
The lives of the artists / Giorgio Vasari; translated with an
introduction and notes by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter
Bondanella.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Translation of 36 of the lives found in Vita depi eccellenti
architetti, pittori et scultori italiani.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. ArtistsItalyBiography. I. Bondanella, Julia Conaway.
II. Bondanella, Peter E., 1943. III. Title. IV. Series.
N6922.V2213 1991 709.2245dC20 90-48810
[B]

ISBN 019283410X

5 7 9 10 8 6

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Written by Giorgio Vasari, Painter and Architect of Arezzo, Revised and Extended by the Same, Along with Their Portraits, and with the Addition of the Lives of Living Artists and Those Who Died Between the Years 1550 and 1567

Giorgio Vasari was born of relatively humble stock in the little town of Arezzo, most famous today for the magnificent fresco cycle on the Legend of the True Cross done in the main cathedral by Piero della Francesca. According to Vasaris own testimony, his ancestry included at least one potter (vasaro or vasaio). Arezzo was part of the Florentine Republics provincial territory, and this fact eventually guaranteed young Giorgio relatively easy access to the artistic circles of the capital city. In 1524, his father Antonio Vasari, who encouraged his interest in drawing, persuaded Cardinal Silvio Passerini, the representative of the newly elected Medici Pope, Clement VII, who was then passing through the city, to take the boy to Florence to be apprenticed as an artisan. Years later, in his