The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

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Reed Enger, "The Lives of the Artists, The first encyclopedia of artists," in Obelisk Art History, Published February 15, 2016; last modified October 31, 2022, http://www. As one critic noted: ‘Kippenberger staged his public life because he thought he could bear it better in its mythologised form. I discovered this work by accident and am very glad that I did, as it is the bible of Italian renaissance art biography. Its very real value in doing so is proven by the fact that it remained in print and in demand through the nineteenth century. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.

The real taboo that Koons shattered can be located in the manner in which he used his very public relationship with Staller to challenge the humanistic expectations of the role of the artist in contemporary society. Someone left a copy of this book in my apartment in Florence, and since I didn't bring that much reading material with me, I've been reading it in bits and pieces throughout the last few weeks.Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was an artist, architect, and friend to Michelangelo, so his ‘sketches’ of the lives of Italian artists from the 13th to the 16th centuries is of special interest - it’s art history by a guy who was essentially ‘right there’. His relentless pursuit of pleasure was not only publicly acknowledged, but it surfaced in his work, as well as in that of other artists. In him was great bodily strength, joined to dexterity, with a spirit and courage ever royal and magnanimous; and the fame of his name so increased, that not only in his lifetime was he held in esteem, but his reputation became even greater among posterity after his death. Da Vinci painting Mona Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and while doing so, “employing singers and musicians or jesters to keep her face full of merriment and so chase away the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits.

Vasari errs on the side of praising, at least in the chapters that I've read, and he loves Michaelangelo almost to a fault, but since he was once signed up to be an assistant to Michaelangelo, his bias also lends credence to some of his claims. Derived from the name of a region in the Czech Republic inhabited by nomadic gypsies, the modern notion of bohemia designated a place where artists and disillusioned members of the bourgeoisie could intermingle with the poverty stricken, foreigners, racial minorities, homosexuals and anyone else on the margins of society.Not just a collection of biographies, Vasari is surprisingly a good storyteller as well, finding the connections and continuity between the artists and along the years and the development in the arts.

About Vasari himself we know an extraordinary amount, not only from his own writings—in the edition of 1568 he included an explanation of his own life and works—but also from surviving materials that document his life at the court of Cosimo I and his eventful exchanges with so many of the patrons and literati of the period. This marked his formal debut as a visual artist, although his office was more than a studio, as it blended all forms of artistic endeavour à la Warhol’s Factory. Patricia Rubin, "Eliza Foster (dates unknown)", Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2019 (28).I found Vasari's narratives helped me to put two and two together in artistic developments that are scattered across several cathedrals and museums--so it's easier to see the influence between the paintings in this chapel and the painting done somewhere else later. 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. It was interesting to read that Vasari describes several of the artists as having been unteachable and wild in their youth, to the despair of their parents, who then palmed them off on nearby goldsmiths or artist studios, and the rest is history.