"Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects" in 10 volumes is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered one of the most influential and most-read work of the older literature of art, as well as the first important book on art history. The title is often abridged to just the Vite or the Lives. As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. The book contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, including a sketch of Vasari's autobiography, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names.

"Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects" in 10 volumes is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered one of the most influential and most-read work of the older literature of art, as well as the first important book on art history. The title is often abridged to just the Vite or the Lives. As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. The book contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, including a sketch of Vasari's autobiography, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names.

Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies – a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as “memory”, “fragmentation”, “desire”, “genre”, “authorship”, and “censorship”.

`It offers all that the visitor with a concern for beauty and for leisurely sight-seeing will require.' Financial Times`If ever a guidebook were designed to be read as literature it is Mr Honour's. Even those who know Venice welland love it well will add to their appreciation from this seemingly endless store of information.' Economist Offers all that the visitor with a concern for beauty and for leisurely sight-seeing will require. FINANCIAL TIMES The best guide book I have ever encountered... and a book I found it impossible not to read from beginning to end. OBSERVER There are few pleasanter ways of passing a summer's evening than sitting over a cup of coffee, and perhaps a glass of Aurum, in the Piazza San Marco. It is especially agreeable on those nights when the Venetian city band thunders away at some throbbingly romantic piece... And all the while the younger inhabitants parade around the square, chattering, flirting, quarrelling and staring at their visitors with that same unwinking gaze that Venetians have turned on their guests for the past five centuries. The facade of San Marco closes the scene in a glitter of golden mosaic and a bubbling of cupolas, while the great thick red campanile stretches up into the warm mothy darkness of the summer sky. Hugh Honour, it is clear, knows Venice exceptionally well and catches the rhythms of the city's life with unerring skill. His guide, with its winning blend of evocativedetail and precise information, spurs the reader to investigate Venice's wonders: Piazza San Marco is only the beginning of a journey into the heart of Venice and its history.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Often called "the first art historian", Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, which was first published in 1550. He was the first to use the term "Renaissance" (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti, and he was responsible for our use of the term Gothic Art, though he only used the word Goth which he associated with the "barbaric" German style. The Lives also included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. The book was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural). The work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines, and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art — for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is systematically ignored in the first edition. Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) it did so without achieving a neutral point of view. Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, while others are inventions or generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. With a few exceptions, however, Vasari's aesthetic judgement was acute and unbiased. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and those of the immediate past. Modern criticism – with new materials opened up by research – has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. Vasari includes a sketch of his own biography at the end of the Lives, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati. According to the historian Richard Goldthwaite, Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the term "competition" (or "concorrenza" in Italian) in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, and stressed the concept in his introduction to the life of Pietro Perugino, in explaining the reasons for Florentine artistic preeminence. In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition amongst themselves for commissions kept them so. Competition, he said, is "one of the nourishments that maintain them."