Two books, both written at about the same time in the 16th century, in the same place, and on the same subject—artists’ lives—remain the most popular and profitable biographical blockbusters of all time.
Giorgio Vasari’s “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,” with its anecdote-packed profiles of over 200 Renaissance artists, was first published in 1550. Still highly readable, it remains the most invaluable collective biographical compilation ever, issued in over 1,200 successive editions over almost five centuries, many of these in abridged formats.
While Vasari’s “Lives” still outstrips the sales of all other biographies, a picaresque “Autobiography” by his contemporary, the virtuoso Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, remains, to this day, the most widely printed autobiography or memoir in Western history, and one of the most widely read.
An innovative architect, painter and collector of drawings in his own right, Vasari (1511-1574) assembled essential, lively data about his subjects. “The Lives” begins with Cimabue ( Giotto’s teacher) and ends with Titian. It also includes important theoretical chapters on the rise of Renaissance art.
