Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was an Italian painter, architect and writer, born in Arezzo and trained in Florence. He worked for the Medici dukes for most of his career, decorating the Palazzo Vecchio, designing the Uffizi and the corridor that links it to the Pitti Palace, and beginning the frescoes of the dome of Florence cathedral. His Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and greatly enlarged in 1568, is the first history of Italian art, a sequence of biographies from Cimabue to his own contemporaries that invented the idea of a Renaissance and remains the starting point for the study of the period.