Lives of the Artists, Vol. 1: Volume 1
About this audiobook
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.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
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.
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.
Wanda McCaddon began recording books for the fledgling audiobook industry in the early 1980s and has since narrated well over six hundred titles for major audio publishers, as well as abridging, narrating, and coproducing classic titles for her own company, Big Ben. Audiobook listeners may be familiar with her voice under one of her two "nom de mikes," Donada Peters and Nadia May. The recipient of an Audie Award and more than twenty-five Earphones Awards, AudioFile magazine has named her one of recording's Golden Voices. Wanda also appears regularly on the professional stage in the San Francisco Bay Area.
