Dramatist whose works helped bring about the re-evaluation of Michelangelo. Alfieri was born to a noble and wealthy family. His father was Count Antonio Alfieri and his mother Monica Maillard de Tournonthe marquis di Cacherano of Savoy. Count Alfieri died when Vittorio was less than one year old. His mother married a third husband, the cavalier Giacinto Alfieri de Magliano. Vittorio was privately tutored under Don Ivaldi, a priest whose education was poor enough to move him in 1758 to the Military Academy of Turin.

Photo-documentarian, early participant of the Fratelli Alinari photoarchive together with his brothers. The son of an engraver, Alinari grew up in a Florentine art family. His older brother, Leopoldo Alinari studied with engraver Luigi Bardi and learned the emerging art of photography.

Photo-documentarian, founder of the Fratelli Alinari together with his brothers. The son of an engraver, Alinari grew up in a Florentine art family. Leopoldo studied with engraver Luigi Bardi and learned the emerging art of photography while training in the 1840s. In 1852 he established a studio in the Via Nazionale in Florence.

Collector of drawings and connoisseur; worked on a universal history of art. An annotated translation of his life of Bernini was annotated and translated into German by the eminent Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, published in 1912.

Author, art scholar, cinema critic, and translator; wife pupil of the art historian Roberto Longhi. Banti was born Lucia Lopresti. Her father, a lawyer for the railways, Luigi-Vincenzo, was an avid literature enthusiast and her mother was Gemma Benin, both of them of Calabrian background. She attended the Liceo Tasso di Roma (a lyceum or high school), where in 1914 she encountered the young art historian (and future husband) Roberto Longhi.

Etruscan specialist. Banti worked at the Vatican Library between 1930 and 1940 and on the excavations at Crete before her appointment to the University of Rome in the history of religions. In 1948 she was appointed chair of archaeology at the University of Pavia, moving two years later to Florence to teach Etruscan studies, 1950-65 [Archivio biografico italiano states 1954-74]. She also lectured at various American universities during this time. In 1965 she became director of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi, which she held until 1972.

First female professor at La Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; known for publishing an authoritative monograph on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. Barocchi grew up spending time in her family's goldsmith shop in Florence, Italy, near the Ponte Vecchio, which she admitted helped refine her aesthetic sense of experiencing the world as a visual field (Passerini).

Historian of the trecento Italian Renaissance. Bellosi was the son of Enrico Bellosi and Maria Cuccuini (Bellosi). His father worked as a gardener and his mother in domestic service. The younger Bellosi attended the University of Florence where he wrote his dissertation under Roberto Longhi in 1963 on the trecento artist Lorenzo Monaco. After a year in the Italian military, 1963-1964, he worked under the Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze, 1969 to 1979. Bellosi was awarded the Premio Viareggio (award) in 1974.

Wrote the celebrated, Il riposo di Raffaele Borghini in cui della pittura e della scultura si favella, de' più famose opere loro si fa menzione, e le cose principali appartenenti a dette arti s' insegnano in 1584. The fourth section contains important information on the artistic and cultural world of Florence. Borghini relied mainly on Vasari, and is considered Vasari's successor.

Wrote a new edition of Il riposo di Raffaele Borghini in cui della pittura e della scultura si favella (1730) of Raffaele Borghini and wrote the Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, published 1754.

Founder of Arte e storia, a weekly (later monthly) journal beginning 1882 and director, Museo di S Marco (1892, officially 1909-1916).

Mannerist sculptor; his autobiography (Vita) contains evaluations of many renaissance artists. Trained as a goldsmith, Cellini worked primarily as a sculptor. His early work in Pisa on the cathedral (accidentally, he had originally set out for Rome) resulted in a keen knowledge of Roman sculpture via sarcophagi. Finally in Rome by 1519, he dealt in antique medals, gems, and other objects which, according to his autobiography, he routinely discovered.

Collaborator of Offner's Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Cohn studied in Berlin between 1923-26 under Adolph Goldschmidt and Freiburg, 1926-29 under Hans Jantzen, for whom he wrote his dissertation in 1929. His topic was on Han Holbein the Younger. Between 1931 and 1933 Cohn worked as a volunteer in the prints and drawings and library sections at the Staatlichen Museen in Berlin. When the Nazis came to power, Cohn, a protestant of Jewish lineage, was dismissed from his position.

iconography

Archaeologist; discoverer of the "François Vase" (inv. 4209). François traveled widely as a young man. In 1825 he elected to excavate Etruscan sites, beginning with Cosa (until 1828) and then at Cortona in 1843. He also worked at digs in Volterra, Fiesole, Vetulonia, Populonia, Chiusi and Vulci. In 1844 François discovered black-figure vase fragments at Fonte Rotelle near Chiusi in the vicinity of several plundered tombs. The spectacular sherds immensely impressed the archaeologist Arcangelo Michele Migliarini (1779-1865), who encouraged François to search for more fragments.

Art historian and collector; Gabburri compiled after 1719 an ambitious encyclopedic dictionary of artists' lives, ranging from the primitives to his contemporaries, called the Vite, it remains in manuscript.

Sculptor and architect; his Book II of his memoirs forms an important account of 14th-century artists. Ghibert's parents were Cione Paltami Ghiberti (d. 1406), somewhat of a n'er-do-well, and Mona Fiore. Shortly after his birth his mother left Cione to live with the goldsmith Bartolo di Michele (d 1422), known as Bartoluccio, marring him after Cione's death. Ghiberti learned goldsmithing from Bartoluccio. He left Florence in 1400 along with another artist to serve the ruling Malatesta of Pesaro.

Archaeologist and historian of Renaissance art; early developer of systematic Etruscology. Gori took religious orders and was a priest of the Baptistry of S. Giovanni in Florence beginning in 1717 and prior there from 1746. He studied under Anton Maria Salvini (1653-1729) and was inspired by the Etruscan studies of Filippo Buonarroti (1661-1733). Gori was appointed a professor of history at the Liceo of Florence. An early work on classical inscriptions, Inscriptiones graecae et latinae, appeared in 1727. It was about this time, too, that he developed an interest in Renaissance art history.

Merchant, writer and biographer Netherlandish artists. Guicciardini was the son of Jacopo Guicciardini (d. 1552) and Camilla d'Agnolo des Bardi (d. 1557). His uncle was the historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). He was well educated according to the affluent means of his family including learning Latin and some Greek. He moved to Antwerp by 1542 where he remainded his whole life. In 1567, after publishing some minor works, collections of anecdotes and maximes, etc., he published Descrittione di m.