The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art

Description

The man who invented art history, finally given his own biography. Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney’s The Collector of Lives (2017) tells of Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574): painter, architect of the Uffizi — and author of the Lives, the book that created the Renaissance as we know it and made ‘genius’ a job description.

Rowland and Charney write with infectious enthusiasm: Vasari the courtier navigating Medici Florence, Vasari the tireless researcher interviewing old masters’ pupils, Vasari the mythmaker whose stories — true or not — became art’s founding legends. It is biography as adventure, through the most exciting century in art, with the liveliest possible guide.

Lively, learned, and full of great tales. Read it with Vasari’s Lives for the full experience — the mythmaker, mythologized at last. A delight. Rowland and Charney are the perfect guides: learned, lively, and clearly having fun. Vasari finally gets the biography his Lives deserve.

The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art by Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney (W. W. Norton, 2017) is a lively biography of the man who invented art history itself. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was a painter and architect in Renaissance Italy — he designed Florence’s Uffizi — but his lasting fame rests on a book: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in 1550.

Drawing on Vasari’s own stories, Rowland and Charney bring to life the artists he chronicled — Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian — along with the popes, princes, and patrons who shaped their world. They also show how Vasari’s vivid, gossipy, sometimes invented anecdotes created the very idea of the artist as a genius, and how his judgments still color the way we see Renaissance art today.

Written by two engaging scholars, The Collector of Lives is both a portrait of a fascinating insider and a tour through one of the most creative periods in human history. Accessible, entertaining, and full of wonderful stories, it is an ideal introduction to Vasari and the birth of art history — perfect for art lovers, students, and curious general readers alike.