A reading edition
Readable modern English translations made from the 1568 Italian scans, preserving Vasari's confidence, colour and occasional awkwardness.
A living reading project · begun 2026
ReadingVasari
Lives, art & afterlives
Reading the book that helped teach Europe how to tell the story of art—slowly, critically and one artist at a time.
Begin with Vasari
The writer at the centre
Who was Giorgio Vasari?
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was a painter, architect, courtier—and the author of the first great connected history of Italian art.
His Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550 and extensively revised in 1568, gathers biography, anecdote, criticism and artistic theory into one enormous, persuasive story: the arts declined after antiquity, revived in Tuscany and reached perfection in Michelangelo.
It is brilliant, partial and often unreliable. Vasari preserves invaluable evidence, repeats legends, promotes favourites and turns the history of art into a drama of progress. Five centuries later, even the arguments we make against him still begin with the questions he taught us to ask.
The personal reason
Why I'm reading Vasari
I wanted a project that could sit between close reading, art history and writing: not a sprint through the Renaissance's greatest hits, but a patient encounter with the stories from which our picture of it was made.
Vasari is an ideal—and enjoyably difficult—companion. He is never merely a neutral source. He makes judgements, stages anecdotes, builds heroes and arranges history into a rise towards perfection. Reading him means meeting the artists he describes while also watching the idea of the Renaissance being written into existence.
I'll use modern scholarship to correct and complicate his account, but not to erase it. The pleasure of the exercise lies in keeping both things audible: what Vasari actually says, and what five centuries of looking and research allow us to say back.
A site designed to grow
What I'll be building
The site is going live at the beginning, not the end. New Lives, companion pages and blog posts will appear as the reading progresses.
Further reading & selected works
A companion page for every Life: a selective guide to the art, modern scholarship and the questions Vasari leaves behind.
A standalone blog
Notes, essays and detours from the wider project—linked to a particular Life when relevant, but free to follow other threads.
“Vasari's claims remain his claims; modern corrections stay separate.”
The work in progress
A long road,
taken one Life at a time.
Foundation
The threshold
Prologues & the shape of the Lives
Establishing Vasari's three ages of art and separating the framing needed for the Lives from the edition's deeper front matter.
Now
Life 001
Cimabue
Read the complete new translation, then continue to its companion guide to selected works and further reading.
Then
Life by Life
Pisano, Gaddi, Giotto—and onwards
The sequence will follow Vasari's own architecture, allowing his argument about artistic progress to reveal itself gradually.