The Lives without the Medici?

This essay suggests that when Vasari was in the initial stages of redacting the Vite, he gave little or no importance to the Medici or to works they had commissioned or works in their possession. It also shows that this is consistent with the fact that the Vite, first printed in 1550 in Florence and dedicated to Cosimo I de’ Medici, was actually conceived in Rome at least four years earlier, as Vasari himself says, in an intellectual milieu that was markedly anti-Medicean.