Biographies of great painters, sculptors and architects. Volume 2

Another series of ten brilliant masters of the art proposed by Vasari in his "Biographies". A plethora of stunning artists who compelled the translator to provoke our thinking with the apt title to the preface, inviting us on a hunt for giants and Lilliputians. But the question of big and small in art has been around since yesterday. And yet, if we consider as Lilliputians figures like Cimabue, who was the first in Italy to try to break the Byzantine canon in painting and show a new attitude, the feelings and emotions of man; Mazzaccio, who tried to depict realistically the figures without stiffness and excessive clutter; Filippo Brunelleschi, the first architect of modernity, who, among other things, discovered perspective and created wonderful works of architecture and sculpture; and Sandro Botticelli with his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the Adoration of the Magi paintings, "Spring" and "The Birth of Venus", with the magnificent landscapes and paintings in biblical and mythological painting, if we, I repeat, consider them to be second-rate artists, then we have not yet understood anything of Renaissance art and continue to sink in the mire of ignorance.

So it is not giants and Lilliputians, but Giants and Greats who are really all these fine masters who laid the foundations of the new cultural paradigm for their time, called the Renaissance, which changed the idea of art and culture not only in Europe but in the world.

Sava Slavchev