The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

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His relentless pursuit of pleasure was not only publicly acknowledged, but it surfaced in his work, as well as in that of other artists. Someone left a copy of this book in my apartment in Florence, and since I didn't bring that much reading material with me, I've been reading it in bits and pieces throughout the last few weeks.

It may not be perfect as history or always captivating in its story-telling, but it is pretty unique to invite someone from 450 years ago into your study, and to have him tell you stories about artists you revere. The epithets chosen by himself – ‘show-off’, ‘hypervoyeur’, ‘pretender’, ‘informer’, ‘organiser,’ ‘ringleader’ and ‘big spender’ – surrounded his head like a halo. Similarly, Michelangelo’s struggles with Popes who were impatient at times, insulting at others, once causing him to storm off, pack up and leave town. Many of his paintings still exist, the most important being on the wall and ceiling of the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, [8] where he and his assistants worked from 1555.It is far from neutral and Vasari’s judgment is sometimes obviously (more on that in the film I recommend at the end of this review). It really helped make my vacation in Florence meaningful since I spent four days staring up at art filled cathedral ceilings. Salmi, Mario; Becherucci, Luisa; Marabottini, Alessandro; Tempesti, Anna Forlani; Marchini, Giuseppe; Becatti, Giovanni; Castagnoli, Ferdinando; Golzio, Vincenzo (1969). His last major commission was a vast The Last Judgement fresco on the ceiling of the cupola of the Florence Cathedral that he began in 1572 with the assistance of the Bolognese painter Lorenzo Sabatini. In 1899, John Addington Symonds used the Vite as one of his basic sources for the description of artists in his seven books on the Renaissance in Italy, [12] and nowadays it is still, despite its obvious biases and shortcomings, the basis for the biographies of many artists like Leonardo da Vinci.

As one critic noted: ‘Kippenberger staged his public life because he thought he could bear it better in its mythologised form.To mark his 25th birthday that same year, he printed a poster picturing himself with a hooker, with the banner title, ‘A Quarter of a Century as one of you, among you, with you’. With this complicity, Koons fulfilled his role as the new Adam, blissfully savouring the once-forbidden fruit offered by the American way of life, minus the cynicism or guilt that plagued his artistic forbears. Pondering over this matter many a time in my own mind, and recognizing, from the example not only of the ancients but of the moderns as well, that the names of very many architects, sculptors, and painters, both old and modern, together with innumerable most beautiful works wrought by them, are going on being forgotten and destroyed little by little, and in such wise, in truth, that nothing can be foretold for them but a certain and wellnigh immediate death; and wishing to defend them as much as in me lies from this second death, and to preserve them as long as may be possible in the memory of the living.