Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and architect, friend of Michelangelo and intimate of the Medici, is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and in an enlarged edition in 1568. With more than two hundred biographies, it has for centuries been recognised as a seminal text in art history and one of the most important sources on the Italian Renaissance.

It is to Vasari that we owe much of our knowledge of Raphael (1483-1520), who in his day was considered perhaps the greatest painter of all time.

This edition, introduced by the scholar Jill Burke, includes 22 pages of colour illustrations covering the full span of Raphael's oeuvre.