Including David Hockney, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Rem Koolhaas, and Oscar Niemeyer, this is a wonderful and unique book for those interested in modern art. He used it repeatedly, and stressed the concept in his introduction to the life of Pietro Perugino, in explaining the reasons for Florentine artistic preeminence. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The work shows a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving.

He is clearly intent on writing about the artists of Florence and Tuscany with the occasional foray to Mantua, Rome and Venice where it can't be avoided. 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.

Vasari takes a lot of time to describe the works of the artists in details, but it’s still hard to imagine them. As the historical epicentre of la vie de bohème, mid-nineteenth-century Montmartre provided the populist view of how artists should live, behave and look.

The book is structured as a collection of biographic stories with a strong emphasis on concrete works of art that Vasari saw himself and his impressions on those. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Picabia interwove his writings with numerous aphorisms about art, love, the family, glory and money… When Picabia opts for scepticism and insists that there is nothing to understand, or when he prefers the critique of values to superfluous commentary on the works, this is in fact the expression of a philosophy. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, 'Santi di Tito and the Florentine Academy: Solomon Building the Temple in the Capitolo of the Accademia del Disegno (1570–71)', Apollo CLV, 480 (February 2002): pp.

Interpretations of Picabia’s art, writings and lifestyle are all subject to these Nietzschean principles of deformation and nihilism.

For Michelson, the prelapsarian Warhol reflected the ills of mainstream culture through irony-soaked parody. More about artists than art, this book is a fascinating compendium of artists over a 250 year period, documenting how they worked and lived. The campaign to isolate and dismiss the importance of Warhol’s persona in terms of his overall artistic contribution is much more systematic in recent academic writing. From Robert Rauschenberg and Nam June Paik to Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili, and Mark Bradford, his artist profiles have charted an entire era. A devout Nietzschean since early adulthood, he firmly believed that self-generated myth was one of the essential elements in his nihilistic programme.In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition amongst themselves for commissions kept them so. 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. At the time, his friend and teacher Michelangelo was the only living artist included in the encyclopaedia. In 1547, he completed the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes that received the name Sala dei Cento Giorni.

He was born in Arezzo, on 30 July 1511, the first of six children of Antonio di Giorgio Vasari and Maddelena Tacci. He was elected to the municipal council of his native town and finally, rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere. Vasari also helped to organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio.Yet the nuance offered by the German term – its oscillation between promotion/publicity and performance of the self – raises an important distinction. Based on Vasari's text in print about Giotto's new manner of painting as a rinascita (rebirth), author Jules Michelet in his Histoire de France (1835) [5] suggested the adoption of Vasari's concept, using the term Renaissance (rebirth, in French) to distinguish the cultural change.