Giorgio Vasari is recognized as the first historian of art, best known as the author of The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), which covers a host of artists great and small. This book presents a selection of six of the most detailed and luminous of the biographies--the lives of Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. The texts are thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a chronology that relates the artists' lives to the historical events of their time. Also included are reproductions of the works of art discussed in the text, in 120 color plates and 127 black-and-white illustrations, with twenty pages of color foldouts.