The New York Times Book Review - Deborah Solomon
Ingrid Rowland, a prominent scholar of Renaissance art and history, and her fellow writer and historian Noah Charney, wear their erudition lightly in their gracefully written biography, The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art.
David Salle
"Ingrid Rowland writes about artists of the past with an easy intimacy grounded in the deepest erudition. Her project is one of reclaiming classical art and artists from cant, and bringing them, up close, into our own time. Together with coauthor Noah Charney, Rowland gives us a view of the sixteenth-century art world that is uncannily familiar to a student of modern and contemporary art. Reading this book, we feel we know Vasari—that he is one of us.”"
New York Journal of Books
"[A]n engaging, intricate and mesmerizing gem of a book for those who enjoy reading about the lives of artists and placing the Renaissance within a greater context."
Wall Street Journal - Cammy Brothers
"Readers curious about the making of Renaissance art, its cast of characters and political intrigue, will find much to relish in these pages. This is a lively, highly readable point of entry into an important and fascinating text."
Stacy Schiff
"An immersive tour of Vasari’s kaleidoscopic world, rich with court intrigue, iconographic riddles, artistic rivalries, Renaissance wordplay, naughty monkeys, and, possibly, even a lost Leonardo. Rowland and Charney have done the epic biographer proud with this affectionate, original life of the artist."
Ross King
"The Collector of Lives is a fitting tribute to Giorgio Vasari—a book as entertainingly readable as Vasari’s own gossipy tales. Rowland and Charney put this vital figure in Western culture into new contexts and perspectives, offering compelling insights that will entice and satisfy art amateurs and scholars alike."
Deborah Solomon
"Ingrid Rowland, a prominent scholar of Renaissance art and history, and her fellow writer and historian Noah Charney, wear their erudition lightly in their gracefully written biography."
John Stubbs
"We are hugely indebted to Vasari for our sense of the personalities behind Renaissance art, and indeed our sense of the link between art and personality. Here we have a vibrant, engrossing account of this often underrated insider, with generous and scrupulous new translations of key passages from Vasari’s Lives. The authors recover the Vasari who is infinitely more than a mere source; the devoted, gregarious, witty, and expansive guardian of a volatile pack of cultural immortals."
Sarah Bakewell
"Insightful, gripping, and thoroughly enjoyable."
Booklist
"Rowland and Charney lure readers in with a mystery of Dan Brown proportions. …[A]n exciting read. Rowland and Charney are at their best when explaining the workings of the sixteenth-century art world."
The Sunday Times
"Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney give full measure to [Vasari's] artistic skills (and the diplomatic adroitness he needed to exercise them) and place him again at the centre of 16th-century Italian art."
Andrew Graham-Dixon
"A refreshingly sharp and original study of the man who almost single-handedly invented the very discipline of art history. Vasari emerges from this book as a visionary, but also as an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer in artistic reputations: a magnificent teller of truths, but also an outrageously inventive liar. Anyone interested in the Renaissance simply has to read it."
The New Yorker
"[Rowland and Charney's] account of Vasari’s Tuscany, and of the facts (and fictions) that went into his “Lives,” is a fitting tribute to their subject’s biographical achievements."
Library Journal
05/15/2017
Readers of the New York Review of Books will recognize Rowland as the author of penetrating essays that wake one up to the meaning of art, and this biography of a biographer celebrates Giorgio Vasari, a painter/architect in his own right, whose Lives of the Artists launched the very idea of writing about the creative act.
