Le Vite de' Piv Eccellenti Pittori Scultori et Architettori...

Giorgio Vasari

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giorgio Vasari's vast, three-volume compendium of biographies of the most celebrated Italian artists of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries was first published in 1550. A revised, expanded edition appeared in 1568, with each biography accompanied by a woodcut portrait. Exhibited here is the portrait of Perino del Vaga, a pupil of Raphael and the leading painter in Rome in the middle of the sixteenth century, whose informative biography is second in length only to that of Vasari's hero, Michelangelo.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art