Books : The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

Rating: - Extremely Detailed
This is a long, long book with a great deal of information. Clocking in at over five hundred pages and covering about thirty artists of the Italian Renaissance, it is fairly comprehensive and detailed.

Some of Vasari's 'facts' have been discredited over the years and so the reader should not take everything here as gospel and indeed should be using this as a supplementary text with other material to get the best use out of it. Nevertheless it remains an important contemporary text and one of the first books on 'art history' ever produced.

I have to admit that I found it extremely hard going. There are great long lists of works and their subjects and the patrons of artists which it is easy to get bored or confused by but there are some interesting snippets of humour and details of the artists lives and habits which can offer real illumination to what otherwise can be fairly dry.

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Rating: - The One-Eyed King May 19, 2003
'In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.'

This is badly-written, badly-structured, gossipy, confused, misleading, and in too many places downright dishonest. Nevertheless it remians our main source of biographical information on the great artists of the Renaissance and Mannerist periods.

Most of these geniuses were considered so unimportant in their own lifetimes that the details of their lives weren't thought worthy to be recorded. It is telling therefore that it was Vasari, himself a rather vainglorious and self-important artist, who first conceived the notion of setting down the minutae of his own class. Unfortunately he was more a man of the brush than the pen and used his biographical duties to settle a few old scores and to pass on rumor and gossip.

Of course, the very ineptitude with which this work is written gives it an extra appeal in our own dumbed down age, but compared to great biographers of the past, like Plutarch, this is clearly inferior goods. Unfortunately, it's all we have to go on for most of the artists here. If it's a great work, it's a great work solely by default.

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Rating: - For A level and later on an invaluable book
This book will appeal to either the history of art student or someone interested in Renaissance writings. A very useful book in that it offers a chance to see what a Mannerist artist thought about his contemporaries. It provides information on the fashions of the time and even insights into the very character of the artist, including some highly amusing stories and occasionally very biased points of view! If you can put a quote in an essay or exam then you will definately stand out as a good candidate.