The lost Leonardo -- How to read Vasari's Lives -- From potters to painters: Vasari's forebears and first teachers -- From Arezzo to Florence -- Plunder and plague -- Artist versus artist: demonic beetles and morality tales -- The opportunities of war -- Back among the Medici -- Rome after the sack -- A Florentine painter -- Murder and redemption -- The wandering artist -- Florence, Venice, Rome -- Renaissance men: Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo -- Symbols and shifting tastes -- To Naples -- The birth of Lives -- Renaissance reading -- The new Vitruvius -- Sempre in moto -- Shake-up in Florence -- The Accademia del Disegno and the Lives revised -- On the road -- Second Lives -- Still wandering -- Between the cupola and the Sala Regia -- A royal hall -- the legacy of Lives -- Circling back to Giotto's O -- Conclusion: Cerca trova

"Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents--a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar--but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, the classic account that singlehandedly invented the genre of artistic biography and established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill rather than an intellectual pursuit, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari's visionary writings that artists like Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift. Their enduring reputations testify to Vasari's profound yet unspoken influence on western culture. An advisor to kings and pontiffs--and a confidant to Titian, Donatello, and more--Vasari enjoyed an exhilarating career amid the thrilling culture of Renaissance Italy"--Inside dust jacket