As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari.
Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects,
commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography, or an art book of any kind. Its sixteenth-century Italian audience probably found it equally
genre-defying. Discursive, inaccurate, shot through with an agenda that corrupted objectivity, Vasari’s Lies, as it is often called, is nonetheless indispensible, especially to students of
Leonardo da Vinci.
Vasari was an artist before he was an artists’ biographer. He was good but never great, and he probably knew it. The Lives, the first edition of which he penned in 1550, assessed
fellow Italian artists from the 1300s to the 1500s, among them the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).
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