Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

Title page of the 1568 edition of Le Vite
Author	Giorgio Vasari
Original title	Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori
Translator	E. L. Seeley
Country	Italy
Language	Italian
Subject	Artist biographies
Publisher	Torrentino (1550), Giunti (1568)
Publication date	1550 (enlarged 1568)
Published in English	1908
Pages	369 (1550), 686 (1568)

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Italian: Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori), also known as The Lives (Italian: Le Vite), is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "the first important book on art history". The title is often abridged to just the Vite or the Lives.

It was first published in two editions with substantial differences between them; the first in 1550 and the second in 1568 (which is the one usually translated and referred to). One important change was the increased attention paid to Venetian art in the second edition, even though Vasari has still been criticised ever since for an excessive emphasis on the art of his native Florence.

As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari's work was first published in 1550 by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence, and dedicated to Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).

The work has a consistent and notorious favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view. John Symonds claimed in 1899 that, "It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions" (in regards to Vasari's life of Nicola Pisano), while acknowledging that, despite these shortcomings, it is one of the basic sources for information on the Renaissance in Italy.