Giorgio Vasari, architect, and biographer, was born in Arezzo and trained in Florence, in the circle of Andrea del Sarto but above all, he was a Michelangelo idolater.

He spent his busy and productive life as a painter floating between Florence and Rome, but he was really a superb impresario rather than a painter himself and perhaps because of his gift in this direction his work as an architect ranked much higher than his painting.

His principal paintings are in Florence, Rome, and in his own house in Arezzo, which is now a museum. He was however, important in the development of Counter-Reformation iconography and in elaborate allegories glorifying the Medici Grand Dukes.

As a painter, Vasari was one of the most prolific decorators of his time, but today he is not highly regarded because his work represents the most affected kind of Mannerism. As an architect he has a higher reputation, even designing and decorating his own house in Arezzo.

Vasari was also the first important collector of drawings, using them partly as research material for his biographies, for the insight they gave into the creative process.

Vasari's activities as painter and architect have been completely overshadowed by his role as the most important of all artistic biographers. His great book, generally referred to as "Lives of the Artists", is not only the fundamental source of information on Italian Renaissance art, and a key document in the attitudes about the Italian Renaissance.

Vasari wrote with a definite philosophy of art and art history. He believed that art is in the first instance imitation of nature and that progress in painting is in the perfecting of representation. The main theme of the book was to set forth the revival of arts in Tuscany by Giotto, Cimabue, Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael and above all his idol, Michelangelo.

Although Vasari's testimony has often been impugned on particular points, he gathered together an enormous amount of invaluable information and presented it in a lively style, full of anecdotes. Moreover, his qualitative judgments have generally stood the test of time as well and his book became the model for artistic biographers in other countries over the centuries.