ABSTRACT
We read Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists as much for its fictions as for its facts. We turn to the Lives for what it tells us of art and art making, for biographical accounts of artists in early modern Italy, and for the stories Vasari tells. Vasari’s text acts as a mirror that reflects his own experiences as an artist, architect, courtier, and writer, as well as his audience’s expectations about art, place, and narrative. In this chapter I hold that mirror up to Venice, examining some of the differences in Vasari’s treatment of Venice between the two editions of the Lives (1550, 1568) and how these differences reflect the writer’s interests in Venice as well as his own development as an artist.
