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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

THE COLLECTOR OF LIVES

Ingrid Rowland Noah Charney

Giorio Vasari and the Invention of Art

In the tradition of The Swerve and How to Live, a vivid biography that reveals how a Renaissance scholar reshaped the visual world.

Hidden in a vast fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio lurk two simple words: cerca trova. Seek and you shall find. This painted phrase offers a clue in a five-hundred-year-old treasure hunt, laid out by the room’s painter and architect, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). For five centuries, Vasari has had a profound and unrecognized influence on our culture. Through his classic biography of the great masters, Vasari became the godfather of art history, transforming our understanding of artists and their work. Reconstructing Vasari’s life among his peers—including Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo—Ingrid D. Rowland and Noah Charney immerse readers in the thrilling culture of the Italian Renaissance and the intellectual currents that reshaped the visual world. A narrative of intrigue and gossip, deceit and genius, and colorful artistic rivalry, The Collector of Lives presents a lively and inviting introduction to a seminal figure in the very human story of art itself. Ingrid Rowland is an award-winning author, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a professor of classics, art, and architecture based in Rome. Noah Charney is an internationally best-selling author and professor of art history living in Slovenia.

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Book Published 2017-10-01 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

“As this fine book shows, we are hugely indebted to Vasari for our sense of the personalities behind Renaissance art, and indeed our sense of the link between art and personality. Here we have a vibrant, engrossing yet scholarly account of this often underrated insider, with generous and scrupulous new translations of key passages from Vasari'sLives. The authors recover the Vasari who is infinitely more than a mere source; the devoted, gregarious, witty and expansive guardian of a volatile pack of cultural immortals.”

Insightful, gripping, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Ingrid Rowland writes about artists of the past with an easy intimacy grounded in the deepest erudition. Her project is one of reclaiming classical art and artists from cant, and bringing them, up close, into our own time. Together with coauthor Noah Charney, Rowland gives us a view of the sixteenth-century art world that is uncannily familiar to a student of modern and contemporary art. Reading this book, we feel we know Vasari - that he is one of us.

Rowland and Charney lure readers in with a mystery of Dan Brown proportions...[A]n exciting read. Rowland and Charney are at their best when explaining the workings of the sixteenth-century art world.

An immersive tour of Vasari's kaleidoscopic world, rich with court intrigue, iconographic riddles, artistic rivalries, Renaissance wordplay, naughty monkeys, and, possibly, even a lost Leonardo. Rowland and Charney have done the epic biographer proud with this affectionate, original life of the artist.

A refreshingly sharp and original study of the man who almost single-handedly invented the very discipline of art history. Vasari emerges from this book as a visionary, but also as an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer in artistic reputations: a magnificent teller of truths, but also an outrageously inventive liar. Anyone interested in the Renaissance simply has to read it.

This is an important book and long awaited. The authors have done a commendable job of returning to his rightful place the man who inflated the reputation of art and artists so successfully that he himself was squeezed out of the picture.

The Collector of Lives is a fitting tribute to Giorgio Vasaria book as entertainingly readable as Vasari's own gossipy tales. Rowland and Charney put this vital figure in Western culture into new contexts and perspectives, offering compelling insights that will entice and satisfy art amateurs and scholars alike.

Chinese (simpl.): Zhejiang University Press ; Italian: Mondadori Libri ; Japanese: Kashiwashobo ; Russian: Mann, Ivanov & Ferber

In this absorbing and well-researched biography, two experienced art historians... map out the endlessly industrious life of one of the original gatekeepers of Western civilization... Rowland and Charney do more than deliver a richly detailed life of this singular Renaissance figure. They raise intriguing questions about how tastes and standards develop.