Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects was first published in 1550 and reissued, greatly expanded, in 1568. A painter himself (see his Venus and Cupid, no. 9), he knew personally many of the artists about whom he (and his collaborators) wrote, and his Lives remains the single most informative source on Renaissance art in Italy. Here it is open at the beginning of his biography of Titian.