Born in the Florentine subject city of Arezzo, Giorgio was the child of a potter, and precocious enough for Cardinal Silvio Passerini, guardian of the young Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici, to sponsor his education alongside them in Florence – presumably to act as a provincial spur to their overprivileged laggardliness. Thus began a connection with the Medici that lasted until the death of the steadiest patron of his work as a painter, architect and decorator-of-all-work, the Grand Duke Cosimo I. Thanks to a steady succession of Medicean and papal commissions (interspersed with others from individuals and religious bodies), Vasari produced an immense volume of artistic work, helped by a natural fluency and by teams of capable assistants: both were factors in his contemporary fame as an artist and his subsequent neglect – until quite recently. As a painter his quality can be gauged by the posthumous portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the altarpiece of the Immaculate Conception in…