The lives of the artists vasari

“The best way [to be informed about Leonardo and his contemporaries] will be to read their Lives, done by Vasari.”

“O listen to the malignant Vasari, he says that the rivals of Titian were not men of valor when these … all … were painters of great importance.”

About Vasari himself we know an extraordinary amount, not only from his own writings—in the edition of he included an explanation of his own life and works—but also from surviving materials that document his life at the court of Cosimo I and his eventful exchanges with so many of the patrons and literati of the period.

He was born in Arezzo, on 30 July , the first of six children of Antonio di Giorgio Vasari and Maddelena Tacci.

Antonio, as Vasari put it in a letter to a friend, was a deprived citizen and artisan but he married well and he was able to provide Vasari with his first schooling in Arezzo and some instruction in art from the French glass painter Guillaume de Marçillat who was working then in the Cathedral.

But in , when he was 13 years old, Vasari was taken to Florence by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, if not a quite notorious character, where he continued his formal education under Pierio Valeriano, tutor to the two young members of the Medici family, Alessandro and

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