THE LIFE OF BECCAFUMI (Lives of the Artists) - Softcover

Contemporary of Vasari's hero, Michelangelo, and like him a sculptor as much as a painter, Domenico Beccafumi could nonetheless hardly present a more different artistic personality. His calligraphically curved figures--often wispy and strangely insubstantial, and bathed in a mysterious gloom--look away from classicism to the picturesqueness of early Sienese painting and the most romantic elements of Mannerism. His idiosyncratic achievement is a fascinating example of the unexpected riches of Italian renaissance art outside the well-trodden paths of Florence and Rome. Vasari's biography is our main source of information for his life, and remains a fascinating description of an unmistakably individual artist.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), painter, architect, and intimate of the Medici, was a leading exponent of the later renaissance style sometimes called Mannerism, which was heavily influenced by Michelangelo. His lasting monument, however, is undoubtedly the "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," first published in 1550.