The Delight of Art

The Delight of Art offers a highly original, erudite interpretation of Vasari’s Lives, one of the most influential texts on the arts. David Cast approaches Vasari’s long, tripartite work as a complex rhetorical history rather than as an archival document mined for facts about the artists. He focuses on the delight Vasari mentions in his accounts of viewers’ responses to works by artists from Giotto to Michelangelo. Cast finds in delight what might be called a threshold into the arena where the cultural and social orders met to produce a sphere of subjectivity as well as that of the compelling Renaissance invention, the artist.

"A study based on the text, the Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari. Discusses how the visual arts in the Renaissance were an occasion for delight or pleasure. Argues that such an attention was encouraged by certain social and intellectual practices"--Provided by publisher.

David Cast is Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.