Time was when Vasari and his account of the most excellent Italian architects, sculptors, and painters could easily be dismissed as a source for a serious history of the Renaissance. And if the text itself was a pleasure to read, the very inventiveness of Vasari's narrative might be seen, as the critic Robert Langton Douglas put it, as merely a distraction from looking more carefully at the forms of the art. We are more sympathetic now, recognizing that whatever we make of Vasari's text, it can stand as an immensely rich record of the culture that Florence had established for itself by this time. And a record, seen so, that can reward the scholars who have plumbed its depths and used it as a starting point for their own descriptions of the history of Renaissance art. All this new scholarly material is well known to the authors of the present volume, who have produced an accurate introduction to a text that they describe—perhaps overoptimistically—as one still read by every student of European art history and one, if properly contextualized—this judgment we can agree with—that can still refine the ideas we have about the art of the Renaissance.

The narrative is framed front and back by an account of the recent explorations of Maurizio Seracini in the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, where, under pictures by Vasari, traces of Leonardo's fresco of the battle of Anghiari perhaps still remain. Between these bookends are thirty chapters of varying lengths, tracking the record of Vasari's life as an artist and courtier and referring to the cultural possibilities, understood by artists and patrons alike, that defined the ever-developing notions of the artist and of art. There is much here: the practice of disegno and the record of the collecting of drawings; how an artist like Vasari was educated; records of often-vicious political and cultural conflicts, which, as in the Sack of Rome in 1527, none could escape; the cultural role of the Medici; the records of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo; and the literary and philosophical sources available to Vasari. And then, in the final pages, as a summary of the cultural politics of the age, an account of the funeral of Michelangelo, engineered by Vasari and his colleagues, followed by what the authors call the legacy of his text, which they see, perhaps too enthusiastically, as the very invention of the idea of art as it is understood today.

Many of these topics will be familiar to readers of this journal, if not in many of their details. While the writing may come off as too breezy at times—Mrs. Vasari; Cellini as a Renaissance Ernest Hemingway; Leonardo, if performing strambotti at court, being something between a pop singer and a rapper—the authors’ research practices are sound. Readers, if so minded, can find more information about topics that interest them in the footnotes, the thoroughness of which clearly indicates the extent to which the authors read and incorporated existing scholarship. But who might be such readers? It is interesting for us in the academy to note a recent rush of historical writings—I have certainly been their beneficiary—that attempt to present serious and important subjects to a general audience, free from the often-deadening scholarly apparatus that marks more-professional accounts. I am thinking here of someone like Sarah Bakewell, one of the authors commending this book on the dust jacket, and her accounts of Montaigne and the French intellectuals in Paris after the Second World War. It is in such a generous context that this book is best read, and, whatever reservations one might have about the language of the narratives or the topics left out, any text that directs more attention to Vasari—or Giorgetto Vassellario, as Benvenuto Cellini once chose to call him—and his achievements is to be appreciated and praised.