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Lives of the Artists, Vol. 1 by Giorgio Vasari
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Lives of the Artists, Vol. 1

$20.99

Retail price: $27.95

Discount: 24%

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Narrator Wanda McCaddon

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Translator George Bull
Length 18 hours 16 minutes
Language English
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Georgio Vasari’s original vision of the arts was to see the artist as divinely inspired. This historical work describes the lives of forty-five artists, including Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, with striking immediacy conveyed through character sketches, anecdotes, and detailed recording of conversations. Despite some factual inaccuracies, Michelangelo praised Vasari for endowing artists with immortality. Vasari’s shrewd judgments and his precise pinpointing of the emotions aroused by individual works of art bear out his prediction that he would have a worldwide influence on the history of art.

Volume One covers the following artists: Cimabue, Giotto, Uccello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Alberti, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, as well as additional notes on the artists.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), born in Tuscany, studied in Florence with Michelangelo while he was still a boy. When his patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated, Vasari wandered round Italy filling his notebooks with sketches; by his thirties, Vasari was a highly successful painter. He returned to Florence in 1555, where he was appointed architect of the Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari was knighted by Pope Pius V in 1571.

Wanda McCaddon (a.k.a. Nadia May or Donada Peters) has narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, has earned numerous Earphones Awards, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.

George Bull is an author and journalist, and has been foreign news editor of the Financial Times and editor-in-chief of The Director magazine. He has translated several volumes for Penguin Classics, including Machiavelli’s The Prince, Cellini’s Autobiography, and Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. He has also translated Condivi’s Life in his Michelangelo: Life, Letters and Poetry. George Bull has written books on Venice and the Renaissance, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London, and is married with four children.

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Reviews

“The single most important contemporary source of information on hundreds of artists of the Italian Renaissance period.”

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