We call it the Renaissance partly because of Giorgio Vasari's word rinascita
Giorgio Vasari described Giotto's new way of painting as a rinascita, a rebirth. Three centuries later the historian Jules Michelet borrowed the idea, in French, to name an entire cultural era. Vasari's Lives of the artists still anchors how we tell the story of Leonardo and Michelangelo, errors and all.
Vasari was born prematurely in Arezzo on 30 July 1511. His cousin Luca Signorelli recommended him to a stained-glass painter, and at 16 he went to Florence with the backing of Cardinal Silvio Passerini, joining the circle of Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo. Michelangelo befriended him and shaped his style. He studied Raphael in Rome in 1529, married into one of Arezzo's richest families, grew wealthy, was knighted by the Pope and served as his home town's gonfaloniere, its highest office.
As a Mannerist painter he was admired in his own day more than later. He frescoed a hall in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, nicknamed the Hall of a Hundred Days, and from 1555 decorated the Sala di Cosimo I in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. He worked so constantly for the Medici that he was effectively their minister of culture. His last big commission, a Last Judgement inside the dome of Florence Cathedral begun in 1572, was finished after his death by Federico Zuccari.
His architecture shaped Florence. The Uffizi's long, narrow courtyard works as a public square with a unified design, rare for a Renaissance street, and the Vasari Corridor links the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti, crossing the Arno above the Ponte Vecchio. He remodelled Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, removing their medieval rood screens, and designed Michelangelo's tomb in Santa Croce. In 1563 he helped found Florence's Academy of the Arts of Drawing, with Cosimo I and Michelangelo as its heads.
The Lives, his collected biographies of painters, sculptors and architects, is considered the foundation of Western art history and is still widely cited. It also spread, very successfully, the notion that Florence led the visual arts, and it contains many factual errors, especially about artists who lived before Vasari. He died in Florence on 27 June 1574, aged 62.
Source: Giorgio Vasari
