Ilona Staller became his best PR, using her genitalia, Koons said, to ‘communicate a very precise language’. Jonathan Foster") was published by Henry George Bohn in 1850-51, with careful and abundant annotations. This event also marked a dramatic shift in the way he consciously used his celebrity, and perhaps the emergence of public persona as a legitimate and autonomous artistic medium. For the last six decades, his profiles of contemporary artists, from Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to Cindy Sherman and Mark Bradford , have become the liveliest and most authoritative guide to the art of our time.

I confess it’s a little tough to read through some sections of this book, as Vasari has a tendency to abbreviate the actual lives of these artists and describes their work one piece after another in detail, so I skimmed at times. It is now a museum in his honour named the Casa Vasari, whilst his residence in Florence is also preserved. The subject for the art commissions in these days was mostly biblical scenes, some mythology, portraits, and how many times is it possible to be excited to read the description of the nativity or annunciation for example?

Unlike the purely cynical marketing strategies in the mainstream of the music business and the art world, Kippenberger’s Selbstdarstellung contained a complex economy of checks and balances, promotion and self-effacement, exuberance and humility, gut-splitting humour and profound melancholia.

As well as his important contributions to some of the major art movements of the twentieth century, Picabia had a ferociously unconventional persona. Similarly, Michelangelo’s struggles with Popes who were impatient at times, insulting at others, once causing him to storm off, pack up and leave town. It influenced the view art historians had of the Early Renaissance for a long time, placing too much emphasis on the achievements of Florentine and Roman artists while ignoring those of the rest of Italy and certainly the artists from the rest of Europe. O listen to the malignant Vasari, he says that the rivals of Titian were not men of valor when these … all … were painters of great importance. This paradoxical coupling of extreme public exposure and sense of invisibility might be chalked up to some manifestation of false modesty, as morally bankrupt as his indiscriminate activities, but it could also be attributed to the fulfilment of one of his philosophic maxims.

I learned SO much when I remembered to take my copy along with me to the museums and cathedrals of Florence. The History of Painting in Italy: The Florentine, Sienese, and Roman schools, by Luigi Lanzi, page 201-202. His love of fast cars – Man Ray made several images of him with cars in the 1920s – was surpassed only by his insatiable taste for women. The most recent new English translation is by Peter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, published in the Oxford World's Classics series in 1991.

Its influence is situated mainly in three domains: as an example for contemporary and later biographers and art historians, as a defining factor in the view on the Renaissance and the role of Florence and Rome in it, and as a major source of information on the lives and works of early Renaissance artists from Italy.Martin Kippenberger explored the clichés and norms of the art world, and the art of his generation is better understood in the light of the emergence of rock and punk, transforming this taboo-breaking energy into art. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment [ clarification needed].