Lives of the Artists, Vol. 2

Summary

Georgio Vasari’s original vision of the arts was to see the artist as divinely inspired. This historical work describes the lives of forty-five artists, including Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, with striking immediacy conveyed through character sketches, anecdotes, and detailed recording of conversations. Despite some factual inaccuracies, Michelangelo praised Vasari for endowing artists with immortality. Vasari’s shrewd judgments and his precise pinpointing of the emotions aroused by individual works of art bear out his prediction that he would have a worldwide influence on the history of art.

Volume Two covers the following artists: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Luca della Robbia, Michelozzo Michelozzi, Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Veneziano, Jacopo, Giovanni, and Gentile Bellini, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Bernardino Pintoricchio, Pietro Perugino, Piero di Cosimo, Fra Bartolommeo of San Marco, Andrea del Sarto, Giovanni Battista Rosso, Francesco Mazzuoli (Parmigianino), Jacopo Palma and Lorenzo Lotto, Giulio Romano, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, and Jacopo Sansovino, along with notes on the artists.