Why I'm reading
Vasari in public
A note on the book, the project and what I hope to learn by taking the Lives one artist at a time.
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 of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is enormous, unruly and wonderfully persuasive. Vasari preserves biography, anecdote, criticism and artistic theory, then arranges them into a single great story: art falls away after antiquity, returns to life in Tuscany and reaches its perfection in Michelangelo. It is a brilliant construction. It is also partial, self-interested and often wrong.
That tension is the attraction. I don't want to use modern scholarship to tidy Vasari out of the picture, or to treat his book as a neutral catalogue of facts. I want to keep both voices audible: what he actually says, and what five centuries of looking, attribution and research allow us to say back.
What the site will hold
I'll work through the book one artist at a time. Each Life will have a translation page, made from the 1568 Italian text, with source information and editorial notes kept close to the words. Alongside it will sit a separate Further Reading & Selected Works page: a selective guide to the art, the modern identifications and the scholarship that complicates Vasari's account.
That pairing gives every Life a useful shape without pretending I must manufacture an original essay about every artist. Some Lives will prompt longer arguments; others may simply need a careful translation and a good route into further study.
The blog is deliberately separate. It is a place for essays, questions, working notes and detours that belong to the project as a whole. When a post concerns Cimabue, Giotto or another Life, it can be tagged and linked back to that artist. When it does not, it is free to stand on its own.
The aim is not to finish quickly. It is to read closely enough that the old story becomes strange, vivid and arguable again.
Why make the work public?
This is a personal, non-commercial hobby project, and I am an interested amateur rather than an art historian. Publishing the work before it is complete is partly a form of discipline: it makes the sources, uncertainties and changes of mind visible. I also hope the results might be useful—or simply enjoyable—to somebody else reading alongside me.
I should also be clear about the tools. I cannot read sixteenth-century Italian fluently, so I use artificial intelligence to help transcribe scans and produce draft translations. I use it to organise research and background material, and to help build this website. A translator, editorial assistant and web designer are beyond the means of a one-person spare-time project; these tools make the scale of the experiment possible.
None of that makes the scholarship on which this project depends redundant, and it does not transfer responsibility for errors. AI accelerates some of the mechanics; the choices and mistakes remain mine. Sources and credit will be made explicit, and Vasari's claims will stay visibly separate from modern correction.
There is no grand conclusion or strict timetable promised here. The site will grow at the pace of the reading. For now, the next Life is enough.