We will examine the ways in which Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” have morphed into modern and postmodern literature, focusing on the novelistic and lyric subversions of the original model. Adjustments to the standard narrative include biographies of wretched artists, artsy dealers, and aesthetically inclined criminals; texts set within the imagined world of a painting; tales privileging the instrument or materials over the artist; and dramatically rewritten or unwritten lives of the usual suspects. At stake here is less the figure of the artist than his or her disfiguration in the service of contemporary literature.
