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

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During this early yet hyperactive phase in his life, his indecision about his vocation produced a maelstrom of creative activities. the traditional definition of Renaissance art as the humanistic innovations of Florentine and Roman artists, to which Giorgio Vasari's Vite (1550, 1568) gave rise. It is now a museum in his honour named the Casa Vasari, whilst his residence in Florence is also preserved.

The work has a consistent and notorious favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving.Of course, it can get boring at times when reading of an artist you never heard about and going through long passages on his work, and from what I understand, this edited version doesn’t even include all the artists he wrote about. Karel Van Mander was probably the first Vasarian author with his Painting book ( Het Schilderboeck, 1604), which encompassed not only the first Dutch translation of Vasari, but also the first Dutch translation of Ovid and was accompanied by a list of Italian painters who appeared on the scene after Vasari, and the first comprehensive list of biographies of painters from the Low Countries. Vasari’s passion for art and his undoubted standing as an art critic make this an uplifting and very informative read. As one critic noted: ‘Kippenberger staged his public life because he thought he could bear it better in its mythologised form. His relentless pursuit of pleasure was not only publicly acknowledged, but it surfaced in his work, as well as in that of other artists.

The first volume starts with a renewed dedication to Cosimo I de' Medici, [14] followed by an additional one to Pope Pius V. The result has been that avant-garde strategies have been absorbed into mainstream culture, sucked in by the allure of the culture industry. According to professor Patricia Rubin of New York University, "her translation of Vasari brought the Lives to a wide English-language readership for the first time.His first artwork – a cycle of 100 small-format paintings titled One of You, A German in Florence, made out of frustration with his acting career in 1977 – might hold the key to this seeming contradiction. In 1563, he helped found the Florentine Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution.

His discourse is peppered with pseudo-revolutionary maxims, explaining the desires that drive his art: ‘to communicate with the masses’; to provide ‘spiritual experience’ through ‘manipulation and seduction’; to strive for higher states of being promised by ‘the realms of the objective and the new’.The first covers Cimabue and Giotto, the two who began breaking from Byzantine forms to usher in the Renaissance, the second includes Ghiberti, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Botticelli among others from the 14th and 15th centuries, and the third includes Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. He has championed the avant-garde and worked the miracle of making the difficult seem easy without talking down to readers. I learned SO much when I remembered to take my copy along with me to the museums and cathedrals of Florence.