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

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I only read sections of it, mostly pertaining to artists whose work I had recently seen on a trip to Florence. Giorgio Vasari was a painter and architect during the Italian Renaissance, a contemporary of Raphael and Michelangelo. The result has been that avant-garde strategies have been absorbed into mainstream culture, sucked in by the allure of the culture industry. He was the first to use the word ‘Renaissance’ in a cultural context; and he also coined the term ‘Gothic Art’ in describing the creative resurgence of northern Europe.

Koons met the Eurotrash pop singer/porn star/member of the Italian parliament Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina) in 1989 after having based the sculpture Fait d’Hiver (from the Banality series, 1988) on a found image of her body. It is far from neutral and Vasari’s judgment is sometimes obviously (more on that in the film I recommend at the end of this review).Also, it was a bonus to learn that the author was an artist himself, that lived during the time of Michelangelo! Through character sketches and anecdotes he depicts Piero di Cosimo shut away in his derelict house, living only to paint; Giulio Romano’s startling painting of Jove striking down the giants; and his friend Francesco Salviati, whose biography also tells us much about Vasari’s own early career. The first volume starts with a renewed dedication to Cosimo I de' Medici, [14] followed by an additional one to Pope Pius V. In 1529, he visited Rome where he studied the works of Raphael and other artists of the Roman High Renaissance. His psychiatry of the growth of the Renaissance is still the accepted history of the period, even if modern scholars now allow that it happened not just in Vasari’s Rome and Florence but all through Europe.

This version, extensively translated, remains the stencil for biographical encyclopedias to this day.In this light, the superficial appearance of his sea, sex and sun lifestyle on the Côte d’Azur in the early 1940s seems deliberately challenging, particularly during a time of war. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view. 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.