Giorgio Vasari[a] (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, art historian, and biographer who is best known for his work Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing, and still much cited in modern biographies of the many Italian Renaissance artists he covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, although he is now regarded as including many factual errors, especially when covering artists from before he was born.

He was effectively what would now be called the minister of culture to the Medici court in Florence, and the Lives promoted, with enduring success, the idea of Florentine superiority in the visual arts.

[6] Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass.

[7][8] Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils, Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo, where his humanist education was encouraged.

[citation needed] In 1563, he helped found the Florentine Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and Michelangelo as capi of the institution.

Among his better-known pupils or followers are Sebastiano Flori, Bartolomeo Carducci, Mirabello Cavalori (Salincorno), Stefano Veltroni (of Monte San Savino), and Alessandro Fortori (of Arezzo).

[11] 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.

[15] In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammannati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia.

Often called "the first art historian",[16] Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects).

Vasari was responsible for the modern use of the term Gothic art, as well, although he only used the word Goth in association with the German style that preceded the rebirth, which he identified as "barbaric".

[citation needed] The work shows a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art – for example, the invention of engraving.

Vasari dismisses Bazzi's work as lazy and offensive, despite the artist's having been named a Cavalier of the Supreme Order of Christ by Pope Leo X and having received important commissions for the Villa Farnese and other sites.

He did carry out research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and his biographies are considered more reliable in the case of his contemporary painters and those of the preceding generation.