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Vasari's Life

Giorgio Vasari 's life of Donatello in his Lives of the Artists was mostly researched in the 1540s, around a century after the events he recounts, and contains some clear and significant errors of fact. It fully recognises Donatello's stature as an artist, and lists many works. His knowledge of those in Padua and Siena appears shaky, and may rely on the accounts of others. In his life of Raphael he praises the "beautiful fancy" (bel capriccio) of some figures, which Vasari himself later drew on; but he is evidently unaware that Raphael took them from a Donatello church relief in Padua. He also places Donatello's birth in 1403, some seventeen years after better-informed modern scholars, aware of the record of the assault in 1401, and payments for work going back to 1406.

Vasari, a fierce Florentine patriot, saw Donatello as the start of Florentine dominance in Renaissance sculpture, and traced a line of succession between him and his hero Michelangelo, via the somewhat dubious link of Bertoldo di Giovanni (d. 1491), a pupil of Donatello and in theory Michelangelo's mentor when he ran the informal "garden academy" of Lorenzo de' Medici at the end of his life. Vasari stressed the close ties between Donatello and the Medici, which were certainly important in his life, but also mirrored those Michelangelo and Vasari himself enjoyed.