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The Lives of the Artists

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The Lives of the Artists

By: Giorgio Vasari
Narrated by: Neville Jason
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Summary

An Italian Mannerist architect and painter, Giorgio Vasari was acquainted with many of the most famous artists of his day. He is best-known today for his biographies of artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Giotto. This recording is read with clarity and authority by Neville Jason.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2008 Naxos Audiobooks (P)2008 Naxos Audiobooks Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers Italy Middle Ages

Editor reviews

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was born during one of the greatest eras of art, and five centuries later his work gives readers a contemporary window on the Renaissance. In these excerpts from his massive work, Vasari not only describes the artists’ major works, but shares personal reflections about the men themselves. Narrator Neville Jason, who also has chosen and abridged the selections, is skillful with the Italian and clearly shares Vasari’s ear for entertaining anecdotes.

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Leaving aside the arguements about trusting Vasari's grasp of the truth, he's unarguably an entertaining writer, which listening to these highlights brings out. The artists have been pruned drastically, as have the biographies of the famous names that have been kept - the survey of works by each artist is mostly omitted. The narration is excellent and mostly unconfusing. (But the narrator does refer to, for example, what sounds like the art of merchants, which is in fact the Arte or Guild of Merchants.)

As usual each chapter is just labelled as such, with no indication as to which artist it deals with. This makes navigating it a trial and a torment, but this is such a common, and often complained about, shortcoming of Audible that it's becoming truly tedious saying so and reading about it.

Excellent content, poor presentation

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This is an absolute must read for any art historian. I'd recommend, of course. However, the music between chapters is really, really grating. Also, on your mobile device you can't download the accompanying PDF which is annoying. This is made more annoying by the fact that the chapters aren't named, they're only numbered. So it's hard to find your bearings, and hard to work out which chapter is which if you want to dip back in and re listen to chapters about specific artists.

Tech issues

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highly recommend for those who love and appreciate italian art, nicely done, enjoyed it big time

Good book, brilliant narrator

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I wish each chapter in this book would state the name of the artist rather than "chapter 1", etc, it would help to make sense of who he's talking about since all the stories are similar in a way. I thought it would be an insightful read prior to going to Florence, but I just couldn't finish it. I'm giving it 2 stars because the actor reading it does a good job of livening up a boring text.

Quite boring - and difficult to keep track

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