Giorgio Vasari
(Arezzo, present-day Italy, 1511-Florence, 1574) Italian architect, painter and art theorist.An outstanding personality of his time, he worked as an architect and as a painter and received important commissions.However, with the passage of time, his practical achievements have been largely overshadowed by his work as a theorist, particularly as a biographer of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance.
Vasari's self-portrait
In 1550 he published the first edition of his Lives of the most excellent Italian architects, painters and sculptors , of which a second, greatly expanded edition appeared in 1568.This work, known simply as the Lives , constitutes an incomparable document for the knowledge of the artistic period to which it refers and is, at the same time, a pleasant work, written with ease and dotted with numerous anecdotes.
The artistic judgments that he makes maintain their validity in almost all cases, and the main reproach that can be made is that he considers the Middle Ages as a period of artistic decadence and that of conceiving art just as a perfect imitation of nature as possible.
As an architect, his main work was the Uffizi Palace, in Florence, a building with a symmetrical and very elegant classicism.His numerous achievements as a painter have not stood the test of time and are now considered artificial and lacking in true genius.He owes the frescoes in the great hall of the Palace of the Chancellery in Rome (exaltation of the life of Pope Paul III) and some of the decorative frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.He was also a great collector of drawings, which in some cases served him to formulate the artistic judgments that he included in his Lives .
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