The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art

In the tradition of The Swerve and How to Live, this vivid biography reveals how a Renaissance scholar reshaped the visual world.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 t…