The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) — Themes and Context

The Preface as Cosmogony

Vasari’s preface is not a conventional historical introduction. It begins with a bold assertion: design, the creative principle of both sculpture and painting, existed from the moment God created the world. The act of forming man from earth is presented as the first instance of both arts. Vasari writes that from this “living example” came the ideas of statues, pose, outline, and the “discordant concords” of light and shadow. He then traces a lineage from the Chaldeans and Egyptians to the Greeks, but the emphasis remains on a divine origin that elevates the artist’s work. This framing shapes the entire volume: each artist’s life is a small echo of that original creative act, and Vasari’s judgments are often moral and spiritual as much as aesthetic.

Andrea Pisano: The Artist as Engineer

The life of Andrea Pisano exemplifies how Vasari’s biographies blend art with urban and political history. Andrea is credited not only with the bronze doors of the Baptistery—cast with the help of Venetian founders and finished in 1339—but also with fortifications, gates, and a model for a never-built fortress. Vasari details how Andrea, working for Walter, Duke of Athens, enlarged the piazza, barred windows with iron, and built a secret staircase. The description of the duke’s arms, defaced but still showing a lion rampant with two tails, is a small detective story. Andrea’s tomb for the jurist Cino da Pistoia is praised for its “fine attitude and style,” yet Vasari notes it would not be valued in his own day, revealing his sense of artistic progress.

Movement Between Cities and Workshops

Vasari’s narrative structure relies on constant movement: artists travel between Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, and other cities, carrying styles and techniques. Andrea Pisano, for instance, made the model for the church of San Giovanni in Pistoia, and his son Nino became a better master. The discovery of the body of St. Atto during foundation excavations is recorded with the precision of a chronicle. This mobility is not just geographical but professional: artists shift from sculpture to architecture to military engineering. Vasari’s accounts often include the names of patrons, the dates of commissions, and the fate of works—whether completed, removed, or destroyed. The reader gains a sense of art as a network of commissions, collaborations, and rivalries spread across the Italian peninsula.

Recurring Images: Materials and Making

Throughout the volume, Vasari returns to the physical stuff of art: bronze, marble, iron, wood, and gold. He describes the casting of the Baptistery doors as “gilt at the fire,” and notes that the metal was cast by Venetian masters. The tomb of Cino da Pistoia is a “marble tomb” with a sarcophagus “full of small figures.” These details ground the biographies in the workshop. Vasari also records the reuse and relocation of artworks: the door was later moved to face the Misericordia. This attention to material and process—how things are made, where they end up—gives the lives a tactile quality. The reader is reminded that every statue or building was once a lump of earth or a block of stone, shaped by human hands.

This volume rewards a reader who attends to the spaces between the lives—the cities, the patrons, the materials. Vasari’s method is cumulative: each biography adds a layer to a collective portrait of an era. The preface’s cosmic claim may seem distant from the iron bars and bronze doors, but it reminds us that for Vasari, every artist’s labor participated in a divine design. To read these lives is to watch a world being built, piece by piece, from the ground up.

I’ve spent years with Vasiari’s first volume, watching Andrea Pisano shift from sculptor to urban planner, art living inside walls and waterlines. It feels good to open the next book, the third, where those craftsmen keep moving, quieter now, like old friends entering the same workshop, sharing one bench. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 03 (of 10) Filarete and Simone to Mantegna — Edition Insights carries that same steady pulse.