[Gavril]

Short introduction:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, or Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "one of the founding texts in art history". The title is often abridged to the Vite or the Lives.

And the work itself, although in incomplete form, here:
Giorgio Vasari\'s Lives of the Artists