Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari invented art history, and most of what everyone repeats about the Renaissance comes from him. He was born in Arezzo, trained in Florence, and worked all his life for the Medici as a painter and architect of enormous productivity and moderate quality. The buildings have lasted better than the pictures. He designed the Uffizi as government offices, with the Vasari Corridor running above the Ponte Vecchio so that the duke could cross the river without meeting anyone, and he remodelled the interiors of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella - stripping out rood screens and medieval fittings in a way later centuries have regretted. His book is the reason he matters. The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects appeared in 1550 and in a much larger second edition in 1568, and it is the first work to treat art as something with a history and artists as people worth biographies. It also set the shape of the story: decline after Rome, rebirth with Giotto, steady progress through Masaccio and Leonardo to perfection in Michelangelo, who was alive and whom he knew. The word rinascita is his. It is unreliable in the particulars. He wrote anecdotes as fact, favoured Florentines over Venetians, and invented a good deal - the claim that Van Eyck invented oil painting is his, and it is wrong. He is still the only source for a great many things, which is the permanent difficulty with him: the choice is between repeating a sixteenth-century Florentine's opinion and having nothing at all to say.

• Lived: 1511 CE – 1574 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter, architect, historian