Is a biography of an artist a work of art history? Should a detailed personal history of an artist inform the interpretation of their art? The two forms were inseparable in sixteenth-century Europe. What some scholars call the first art historical text—Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, published in two volumes in 1550 and 1568, respectively—is a collection of short biographies. While later scholars have questioned the book’s veracity, as well as Vasari’s bias toward artists from Florence, these books (along with Karel van Mander’s Northern European counterpart, published in 1604) established the field of art history in Europe. Vasari relied upon a biographical model to think about art’s historical development in Renaissance Italy, connecting the works of fourteenth-century artists like Giotto to childhood (not yet having mastered linear perspective, for example) and the masterworks of Michelangelo in the sixteenth century to that of a mature adult (full mastery). Such a model might even predict the many deaths (and rebirths) of painting ever since.