Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (), often simply known as The Lives (), is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "the first important book on art history".