Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari is best remembered for writing one of the first and most influential art historical tomes, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, Architects (1550), composed of artist biographies ranging from Classical antiquity through the Renaissance. He had a profound adoration for his friend Michelangelo, who received the most laudatory biography in the volume. It is less known that Vasari was also a practicing painter and architect who studied under the tutelage of Guillaume de Marcillat and Luca Signorelli. Vasari’s paintings drew inspiration from the Tuscan Mannerists, but were criticized by his contemporaries for lacking a mastery of color. Better regarded as an architect, Vasari’s most esteemed project was the structural design of the Uffizi in Florence.