Art: Renaissance Snippets

Giorgio Vasari, like so many other Renaissance Italians, strove mightily to make a name as a great painter. He failed. But history has remembered him for an enduring hobby: gathering snippets of fact & fiction, bright sayings, and queer habits of his fellow painters.

His 1,500-page Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters and Sculptors of Italy made Vasari the world's first art historian. But for him, many an early Renaissance master would be unknown today, many a masterpiece unattributed. Last week, a 300-page abridgement of Vasari's Lives (edited by Betty Burroughs; Simon & Schuster; $3.75) let laymen in on some brisk...

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