Lives of the Artists: Volume 1 » (Reprint)

Twenty-five artists, including Perugino, Sansovino, Veneziano and Giovanni Pisano.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) is the Plutarch of Renaissance Italy. His "lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects" runs to over half a million words and some 160 biographical portraits, among them profiles of Cimabue, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Michelangelo. In particular, he reminds us, again and again, that living, breathing human beings -- cranky and flawed and loveable and terribly ambitious -- created the immortal masterpieces that hang on our museum walls.