The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)
Giorgio Vasari
Oxford University Press, USA
These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art.  Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance," was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto,  Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.  This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics series, contains thirty-six of the most important lives and is fully annotated.