About me · and the method
Why I'm
reading Vasari
I'm Liam Murray: an interested amateur rather than an art historian, working through the Lives because the reading, researching and making are the point of the project.
The beginning
A long book, read slowly
This began for the simplest possible reason: I like art history, I've had a copy of Vasari on my shelves for years, and I wanted a project substantial enough to reward patient attention.
The Lives are fascinating partly because they are not a neutral record. Vasari is biographer, critic, storyteller and advocate all at once. He preserves things we might otherwise have lost, but he also arranges the past into a story with favourites, villains and a very definite destination. Reading him properly means enjoying that story while learning where it bends the truth.
This site is where I'll keep the results. Each Life has a readable translation and a companion page for selected works and further reading; the separate blog has room for notes, essays and detours that need not be forced into that pattern. It's personal and non-commercial, and deliberately public before it is complete. The hope is that showing the work as it develops will keep the process honest—and perhaps make it useful or enjoyable to somebody else along the way.
The tools
A NOTE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Knowing how ubiquitous – and contentious - the topic is these days I want to be really transparent about the way I'm using AI as part of this project.
Since I can't read 16th Century Italian I will be using it to help transcribe scans and produce draft translations. Since I'm doing this alone as a hobby I'll be using it to help me organise research and background material. And since I'm not a web designer I'll be using it to build the site itself. If I was in a position to hire a translator, an editorial assistant and a web designer I might make different choices but clearly I'm not so only the use of AI makes a project of this scale possible for one person working in his spare time.
And to be absolutely clear I'm not suggesting for a second that an interested amateur with an LLM has somehow made five centuries of scholarship redundant! Without the work of those many, many talented people my interest in Vasari and Art History would never have been piqued anyway and this project would never have occurred to me. AI essentially just accelerates the mechanics of the work; any errors in judgment or approach are still mine entirely and I will endeavour to be very meticulous and explicit in noting credit and sources where they belong elsewhere.
The experiment here is not whether AI can replace reading, but whether it can help an interested amateur like me read more carefully, more widely and with greater curiosity.
An open-ended project
No grand conclusion is promised. For now, the next Life is enough.
See where the reading is now