Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

Title page of the 1568 edition of Le Vite
Author	Giorgio Vasari
Original title	Le Vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri
Translator	Eliza Foster
Language	Italian
Subject	Artist biographies
Publisher	Torrentino (1550), Giunti (1568)
Publication date	1550, enlarged and revised in 1568
Publication place	Duchy of Florence
Published in English	1850
Pages	369 (1550), 686 (1568)
OCLC	458416630
Dewey Decimal	709.22
LC Class	N6922 V4924
Original text	Le Vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri at Italian Wikisource

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Italian: Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori), often simply known as The Lives (Italian: Le Vite), is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art",^[1] "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art",^[2] and "the first important book on art history".^[3]

Vasari published the work in two editions with substantial differences between them; the first edition, two volumes, in 1550 and the second, three volumes, in 1568 (which is the one usually translated and referred to). One important change was the increased attention paid to Venetian art in the second edition, even though Vasari still was, and has ever since been, criticised for an excessive emphasis on the art of his native Florence.