The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects or Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni is a series of artist biographies written by Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–96), whom Julius von Schlosser called "the most important historiographer of art not only of Rome, but all Italy, even of Europe, in the seventeenth century".

[2] The first edition (1672) contained biographies of nine painters (Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Barocci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, Domenichino, Lanfranco, and Poussin), two sculptors (François Duquesnoy and Alessandro Algardi), and one architect (Domenico Fontana).

The essay, entitled The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect (L'idea del pittore, dello scultore, e dell'architetto) contributed to a classicist reading of the Lives, as opposed the a book about near-contemporaries.

[5] Winckelmann's theory of the "ideally beautiful" as he expounds it in Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, IV.2.33 ff., thoroughly agrees with the content of Bellori's Idea.

[10] The 2005 translation by Alice Sedgwick Wohl[10] is based on the 1976 Italian edition by Evelina Borea[11] controlled against the editio princeps of 1672[12] and Michelangelo Piacentini's transcription of MS 2506 (one of two copies, ca.