Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists

Check this book out:

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists

I just picked it up about a week ago. I studied English Literature in college, and this book would have been a great resource for me, had I known about it. Giorgio Vasari provides short biographies on the great [Italian] Renaissance artists, including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, among many other lesser-known artists. These artists feature so frequently in works of English poetry and other English (and other European) fiction, that knowledge of these individuals is, in my estimation, invaluable to a better understanding of the written English tradition, and to European tradition in general.