Fact, Fiction, Hearsay: Notes on Vasari's Life of Piero di Cosimo

Abstract

This article presents several new documents that shed new light on the biography of Piero di Cosimo. These sometimes confirm and sometimes cast doubt on specific details in Vasari's Life of the artist. Even more important, they help us see Piero—whose antisocial persona is one of the icons of art history—in a social and public context, through the glimpses they afford of his interactions with fellow artists, relatives, neighbors, and religious confraternities. The problems raised by the new archival discoveries lead to a consideration of the differing conventions applying to legal documents and literary texts like the Lives.