Georgio Vasari's original vision of the arts was to see the artist as divinely inspired.
He describes the lives of forty-five artists, including Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli,
da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, with striking immediacy conveyed through character
sketches, anecdotes, and detailed recording of conversations.

Although Vasari was at times inaccurate, prompting some dry remarks from Michelangelo, Michelangelo
did praise the work for endowing artists with immortality.

Vasari's shrewd judgments and his precise pinpointing of the emotions aroused by individual works of art
bear out his predictions that he would have a worldwide influence on the history of art.

Volume One includes the lives of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and
fourteen more.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) , born in Tuscany, studied in Florence with Michelangelo while he was still a boy. When his patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated, Vasari wandered round Italy filling his notebooks with sketches; during this period, he conceived the idea of the Lives. By his thirties, Vasari was a highly successful painter; when his Lives were published they were received enthusiastically. He returned to Florence in 1555, where he was appointed architect of the Palazzo Vecchio. After a grand tour of Italian towns he published the revised and enlarged edition of his Lives in 1568. Vasari was knighted by Pope Pius V in 1571.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.