Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
Can You Trust Vasari?
By Charles Hope
Giorgio Vasari: Art and History
by Patricia Lee Rubin
Yale University Press, 448 pp., $45.00
Few visitors to Florence pay much attention to Giorgio Vasari's vast cycle of paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio or to his architecture of the Uffizi, but his Lives of the most excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and again in a much expanded form eighteen years later, is the most influential book about the history of art ever written. Unprecedented in scale and scope, the Lives provided a model that was followed by virtually everyone who wrote on the subject for the next three centuries.
Review, 4503 words
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