how did vasari contribute to our understanding of italian art?

Answer 1

I'm assuming your talking about Giorgio Vasari?
Being the first art historian, and collecting and publishing the first biographies of the artists of his time, as well as those of earlier times where it could be substantiated, and explaining technical methods employed by the artists, he left a lasting legacy of the development of art, especially through the Italian Renaissance period. What he began in the 1500's is continued today.
In 1563, he helped found the Florence Accademia del Disegno now called the Accademia de Belle Arti Fiorenze...it was the first academy for artists, and continues today as one of the finest in the world. Its stated purpose was to help young artists to develop by allowing them to train with, and learn from, the masters of the time, as well as to provide examples of past art for the purpose of developing techniques.

Answer 2

Vasari's activities as painter and architect have been completely overshadowed by his role as the most important of all artistic biographers. His great book, generally referred to as Lives of the Artists, is not only the fundamental source of information on Italian Renaissance art, but also a key document in shaping attitudes about the period for centuries afterwards. (The book was first published in 1550 as Le Vite de' più eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani - The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors; in 1568 he published a second, much enlargened edition, in which the painters are mentioned first in the title.)

Vasari wrote with a definite philosophy of art and art history. He believed that art is in the first instance imitation of nature and that progress in painting consists of the perfecting of the means of representation. He accepted the belief of Italian humanism that these had been taken to a high level of perfection in classical antiquity, that art had passed through a period of decline in the Middle Ages, and that it was revived and set once more on its true path by Giotto. The main theme of the Lives was to set forth the revival of arts in Tuscany by Giotto and Cimabue, its steady progress at the hands of such artists as Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, and its culmination with Leonardo, Raphael, and above all Michelangelo, whom Vasari idolized and whose biography was the only one of a living artist to appear in the first edition of his book (the second edition includes accounts of several artists then living, as well as Vasari's own auto-biography).

The idea of artistic progress he promulgated subsequently coloured most writing on the period. Although Vasari's testimony has often been impugned on particular points (see for example Andrea del Castagno and Andrea del Sarto), he gathered together an enormous amount of invaluable information and presented it in a lively style, full of memorable anecdotes. Moreover, his qualitative judgments have generally stood the test of time as well.


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edit #1 FOR BELOW ANSWERER "KEEPER".-
Here is not the University and nobody is blaiming.
It's much worse the use of on line translators when asker requests a native speaker's answer..! I see you're quite new here but you'll calm down just in a few days. If you're going on here you'll see full of this. I feel is not a sin to verbatim or copy and paste to help somebody that's asking a Q.
Do you ?? Well, don't do it!!
Generally I put the source when I'm doing that but this time I didn't. Are there problems ??
However I guess my verbatim answer is more useful to the asker than yr "accurate" one....!!

Answer 3

omg is this allow here??
plagarism
martox answer nothing more than plagarism
When i was in University this is a serious Violation

check this link http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/bio/v/vasari/biograph.html