Abstract

This essay analyses the biographical writings of Paolo Giovio and Giorgio Vasari, as a reference model in the Sixteenth century, and from the point of view of a modern biographical dictionary. After discussing the bonds between the two writers, the essay examines the artists' biographies to highlight the stratified mechanism of historical discourse, rapid and incisive in the Lombard historian, which is shown with competence and technique in Vasarian "Lives". In this way the new biographical paradigm took shape and led, with a heightened historiographical awareness, to the scientific tone of the "entries" found in modern collections.