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Vasari, who is regarded as the first art historian, was born in the central region of Tuscany, where he served the Italian banking family and political dynasty the Medici, in Florence.

It was instantly hailed as a masterpiece, with Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari saying the David "surpassed" any statue that had ever existed before.

Sitting with those magazines, it was as if he were studying the chess equivalent of Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals or Vasari’s lives of the artists.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, arguably the most influential art historian since the Renaissance’s own Giorgio Vasari, popularized the notion of whiteness in ancient marble sculptures in 1764 through two volumes on the topic.

Raphael “continued to divert himself beyond measure with the pleasures of love,” wrote Vasari.