The Founding Text of Art History: Giorgio Vasari’s Vite in a New Critical German Edition

A research project at the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence is working on a new, critical German edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, a fundamental documentary source for Italian Renaissance art. Apart from thorough annotation of the approximately 160 biographies of the artists, their artworks and themes, also Vasari’s rhetorical strategies, underlying subtexts, and parallels to other lives or literary texts are explored. In addition, variations and divergences between the 1550 and 1568 editions of the Vite are analyzed.