This book explores the rich literary character and rhetorical strategies of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which tells the story of Italian art as it unfolded from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to its pinnacle in Michelangelo and the art of the Academy in the mid-sixteenth century. The contributors of Reading Vasari propose ways to understand Vasari's text in the light of recent disputes over what is fact, fiction, or biography, and who may have read Vasari's editions when they were first published. The book isolates and analyses select threads from Vasari's luxurious textual tapestry: these range from architecture, cosmology and philosophy to biography, comedy, elegy and travelogue.