Product Description

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari's literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari's villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer's foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.

Approaching Lives on Vasari's terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari's motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #634380 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-10
• Released on: 2008-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 188 pages

Review
"[An] exceptionally readable and revealing commentary. . . . [A] decisively bold, generously detailed, and essential supplement to Vasari’s writings."
— Comitatus

About the Author
Andrew Ladis is Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. His previous books include The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop and, in four volumes, Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art: An Anthology of Literature.

Customer Reviews

Pure Gold
The mercifully jargon-free essays in this book are pure gold. Indeed, Ladis was not only a supremely gifted art historian, he was also an accomplished writer. Some of the artists discussed in the book are Giotto, Michelangelo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Baccio Bandineli, Buonamico Buffalmacco, and Pietro Perugino. This is a must-read for anyone who has an interest in the Italian Renaissance and its art.

The book has my highest recommendation. You will not be disappointed.