Editing Giorgio Vasari (section)

==''The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects''==
{{main|Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects}}
Often called "the first art historian",<ref>[http://arthistorians.info/vasarig Vasari, Giorgio] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181106132558/http://arthistorians.info/vasarig |date=6 November 2018 }} Dictionary of Art Historians, 2013. Retrieved 26 May 2013.</ref> Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his ''Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori'' (''Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects''). This work was first published in 1550 and dedicated to Grand Duke [[Cosimo I de' Medici]]. Vasari introduced the term "Rinascita" (rebirth in Italian) in printed works – although an awareness of an ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air since the time of [[Leon Battista Alberti|Alberti]]. Vasari's term, applied to the change in artistic styles with the work of Giotto, eventually would become the French term ''Renaissance'' (rebirth) widely applied to the era that followed. Vasari was responsible for the modern use of the term [[Gothic art]], as well, although he only used the word ''Goth'' in association with the German style that preceded the rebirth, which he identified as "barbaric". The ''Lives'' also included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts.<ref name="EB1911" /><ref>Vasari, Giorgio. (1907) ''[https://archive.org/details/vasariontechniqu1907vasa Vasari on technique: being the introduction to the three arts of design, architecture, sculpture, and painting, prefixed to the Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects]''. [[Gerard Baldwin Brown|G. Baldwin Brown]] Ed. Louisa S. Maclehose Trans. London: Dent.</ref> The book was partly rewritten and extended in 1568,<ref name="EB1911" /> with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).{{citation needed|date=November 2021}} [[File:Vite.jpg|thumb|Title page of the first and second part of the 1568 edition of the ''Lives'']]The work shows a consistent and notorious bias in favour of [[Florentine painting|Florentines]] and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of [[engraving]]. [[Venetian painting|Venetian art]] in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is ignored systematically in the first edition. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including [[Titian]]), it did so without achieving a neutral point of view.{{citation needed|date=November 2021}}

Many inaccuracies exist within his ''Lives''. For example, Vasari writes that [[Andrea del Castagno]] killed [[Domenico Veneziano]], which is incorrect; Andrea died several years before Domenico. In another example, Vasari's biography of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, whom he calls "[[Il Sodoma]]", published only in the second edition of the ''Lives'' (1568) after Bazzi's death, condemns the artist as being immoral, bestial, and vain. Vasari dismisses Bazzi's work as lazy and offensive, despite the artist's having been named a Cavalier of the [[Supreme Order of Christ]] by [[Pope Leo X]] and having received important commissions for the [[Villa Farnese]] and other sites.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Zarucchi|first=Jeanne Morgan|date=2015|title=Vasari's Biography of Bazzi as 'Soddoma:' Art History and Literary Analysis|journal=Italian Studies|volume=70|issue=2|pages=167–190|doi=10.1179/0075163415Z.00000000094|s2cid=191976882}}</ref>

Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes seem plausible, while others are assumed fictions, such as the tale of young [[Giotto]] painting a fly on the surface of a painting by [[Cimabue]] that supposedly, the older master repeatedly tried to brush away (a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter [[Apelles]]). He did carry out research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and his biographies are considered more reliable in the case of his contemporary painters and those of the preceding generation. Modern criticism – with new materials produced  by research – has revised many of his dates and facts.<ref name=EB1911/> Vasari included a short autobiography at the end of the ''Lives'', and added further details about himself and his family in his lives of [[Lazzaro Vasari]] and [[Francesco de' Rossi (Il Salviati)|Francesco Salviati]].<ref name="EB1911" />

According to the historian Richard Goldthwaite,<ref>Richard Goldthwaite, ''The Economy of Renaissance Florence'', 2009, pg. 390.</ref> Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the term "competition" (or "concorrenza" in Italian) in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, and stressed the concept in his introduction to the life of [[Pietro Perugino]], in explaining the reasons for Florentine artistic preeminence. In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition amongst themselves for commissions kept them so. Competition, he said, is "one of the nourishments that maintain them".{{citation needed|date=November 2021}}