Giorgio Vasari, who argued that historical progress in art reached its peak in Michelangelo, emphasized Alberti's scholarly achievements, not his artistic talents: " He spent his time finding out about the world and studying the proportions of antiquities ; but above all, following his natural genius, he concentrated on writing rather than on applied work.

During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer who made a number of drawings from them.

His daughter Antonia Uccello ( 1456 – 1491 ) was a Carmelite nun, whom Giorgio Vasari called " a daughter who knew how to draw ".

Julius extended his patronage to the great Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whom he brought to Rome as his maestro di cappella, Giorgio Vasari, who supervised the design of the Villa Giulia, and to Michelangelo, who worked there.

Even Giorgio Vasari, who did not think much of artists north of the Alps, praised it in his Le Vite and called it " a miracle in wood ", though misattributing it.

He had already shown talent, according to Giorgio Vasari, who tells that Raphael had been " a great help to his father ".

Frescos in Perugia of about 1505 show a new monumental quality in the figures which may represent the influence of Fra Bartolomeo, who Vasari says was a friend of Raphael.

Baviero Carocci, called " Il Baviera " by Vasari, an assistant who Raphael evidently trusted with his money, ended up in control of most of the copper plates after Raphael's death, and had a successful career in the new occupation of a publisher of prints.

According to Vasari, who was not only the architect of the Uffizi but also the author of Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 and 1568, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo gathered at the Uffizi " for beauty, for work and for recreation.

None could do it but Brunelleschi, who, according to Vasari:

Giorgio Vasari (; 30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574 ) was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Renaissance artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

A half-century after his death Correggio's work was well known to Vasari, who felt that he had not had enough " Roman " exposure to make him a better painter.

In his father's shop, Vasari reports, Domenico made portraits of the passers-by and visitors to the shop: " when he painted the country people or anyone who passed through his studio he immediately captured their likeness ".

It has been suggested that Vasari was confusing this murder case with another one involving a " Domenico di Matteo " who was killed by an " Andreino " in 1448, but the archival record shows that this is a misreading: " A cursory examination reveals two things: first, that the name of the dead painter is not Domenico di Matteo, but Domenico di Marco ; and second, and much more crucially, that there is no mention of him having been killed by a painter named Andrea or Andreino.

He painted a dead Christ, with Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary and the martyrs local Saints Pietro Parenzo and Faustino. The figure of the dead Christ, according to Vasari, is the image of Signorelli's son Antonio, who died from the plague during the course of the execution of the paintings.

Vasari, who claimed Signorelli as a relative, described him as kindly, and a family man, and said that he always lived more like a nobleman than a painter.

During his lifetime, Cosimo acquired a reputation for eccentricity — a reputation enhanced and exaggerated by later commentators such as Giorgio Vasari, who included a biography of Piero di Cosimo in his Lives of the Artists.

The term was subsequently adopted and popularised in the mid 16th century by the Florentine artist and historian, Giorgio Vasari, who used it to denigrate northern European architecture generally.

The first academy of art was founded in Florence in Italy by Cosimo I de ' Medici, on 13 January 1563, under the influence of the architect Giorgio Vasari who called it the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno ( Academy and Company for the Arts of Drawing ) as it was divided in two different operative branches.

The first stage was scarcely begun by Niccolò Tribolo before he died in 1550, then was continued by Bartolomeo Ammanati, with contributions in planning from Giorgio Vasari, who laid out the grottos, and in sculpture by Bernardo Buontalenti.

Lucas enjoyed a great reputation in his day, and Giorgio Vasari ( who called him Lucas van Hollandt ) even rated him above Dürer.

Early Western writers who took special note of the content of images include Giorgio Vasari, whose Ragionamenti, interpreting the paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, reassuringly demonstrates that such works were difficult to understand even for well-informed contemporaries.

Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo " taught him a great deal about painting ", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d ' Oggione and Boltraffio.

Giorgio Vasari quotes Michelangelo as saying, " If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo.

The contemporary opinion about this work – " a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture " – was summarized by Vasari: " It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh.

Vasari is also credited with first using the term " Renaissance " ( rinascita ), the period during which he was art historian, artist, and architect.

Giorgio Vasari coined the term " Gothic " in an effort to describe, particularly architecture, that he found objectionable, supposedly saying " it is as if the Goths built it ".

On the other hand, others bemoaned the austere Roman culture during his papacy ; Giorgio Vasari in 1567 spoke of a time when " the grandeurs of this place reduced by stinginess of living, dullness of dress, and simplicity in so many things ; Rome is fallen into much misery, and if it is true that Christ loved poverty and the City wishes to follow in his steps she will quickly become beggarly ...".

* Nearly four centuries later Giorgio Vasari wrote: " Guglielmo, according to what is being said, in year 1174 with Bonanno as sculptor, laid the foundations of the belltower of the cathedral in Pisa.

Though traditionally spelled " Mona " ( as used by Vasari ), in modern Italian, this short form of madonna is now usually spelled Monna.

According to Leonardo's contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, "... after he had lingered over it four years, left it unfinished ...." Leonardo, later in his life, is said to have regretted " never having completed a single work ".

Little is known about the early life of Brunelleschi, the only sources being Antonio Manetti and Giorgio Vasari.

Yet another interpretation of the Birth of Venus ( whose title derives from Vasari but whose action perhaps better represents the Arrival of Venus ) is provided here by its author, Charles R. Mack.

Manetti, followed by Vasari, named the Florentine architect and sculptor Bernardo Rossellino as the person responsible for a series of building projects carried out throughout the Papal States at the orders of Pope Nicholas and his name is usually associated with the project in Viterbo.

The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment.

In 1500, when he was only twenty-three ( that is, if Vasari is correct about his age when he died ), he was chosen to paint portraits of the Doge Agostino Barbarigo and the condottiere Consalvo Ferrante.

Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learned it from Leonardo's works is unclear — he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources.

Vasari states that Ghirlandaio was the first to abandon, in great part, the use of gilding in his pictures, representing by genuine painting any objects supposed to be gilded ; yet this claim is not applicable to his entire oeuvre, since the landscape highlights in, as an example, the Adoration of the Shepherds located, in modern age, at the Florence Academy, were rendered in gold leaf.

The account which has come down to us from Vasari ( as usual keen to assert that everything flows from Florence ) is that Mantegna began engraving in Rome, prompted by the engravings produced by the Florentine Baccio Baldini after Sandro Botticelli.

Based upon the word of Giorgio Vasari and some other mid-to-late-16th century comments, as well as upon Giovanni Rucellai's known use of Leon Battista Alberti as the architect of his chapel in the neighboring church of San Pancrazio and for the completion of the facade of Santa Maria Novella, the humanist scholar and artistic theoretician generally has been accepted as having been responsible for having designed the Rucellai Palace's facade.

Vasari writes that people thought this was a great and beautiful achievement.

Already Giorgio Vasari thought that the columns along the nave should have been elevated on plinths.

Vasari thought that they were beautiful, and even fantastic.

The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance, that placed little value on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity.