What do we know of Vasari’s own origins? He was descended from generations of potters, and the name Vasari derives from vasaio, the Italian for “potter.” Spurning the vocation of his father and his grandfather, the young Giorgio took his inspiration from his great-uncle Luca Signorelli, a well-known Florentine artist who nurtured his interest in drawing. “Learn, little kinsman,” Signorelli sweetly exhorted the boy. As his schoolmates played outdoors, Giorgio would sit sketching inside the cool, quiet space of churches, which is where you went in 1520 if you wanted to contemplate top-flight examples of painting and sculpture.

In his own telling, Vasari characterizes himself as a frail child who suffered from chronic nosebleeds. His great-uncle Luca proved useful in this area, too. He tried to stanch the boy’s bleeding with stones reputed to have healing powers. As Vasari recounts, after Luca heard that “my nose bled so copiously that I sometimes collapsed, he held a piece of red jasper to my neck with infinite tenderness.”

Vasari’s mother is treated by the authors with puzzling dismissiveness. When we meet Maddalena Tacci, we are told nothing about her, only that Vasari once joked that she gave birth to another child “every nine months.” Today, such a joke does not register as funny, and it would have behooved the authors to tell us how many children Maddalena had, or where Giorgio figured in the birth order (in fact he was the firstborn son).

In 1527, when Vasari was 16 and studying in Florence, he learned that his father died of the plague that had descended on his hometown. A few years later, when he was living in Bologna, Vasari decided to return home to Arezzo because he was “worried about how his brothers and sisters were faring without their parents,” as the authors write.

Yet his mother was still alive then. She outlived her husband by three decades, dying in 1558, according to standard reference books, such as the Grove Dictionary of Art. It is a little strange, in a biography of this quality, to find the mother of the protagonist rubbed out, as in one of those Disney films in which the moms are killed off at the outset in the interest of dramatizing the embattled status of the hero.

As such an oversight might suggest, the biography as a whole settles for breeziness and even glibness when close analysis is needed. The missing information about Vasari’s family life is unsettling precisely because Vasari tended to view artists as if they made up a big Italian family. By connecting artists whose lives spanned three centuries, he produced one of the first books to insist on the continuity of art. Long before Harold Bloom advanced his theory about the “anxiety of influence,” Vasari recognized that the struggle for artistic excellence pits living artists against the most formidable precursors.

It took an audacious leap for Vasari to see himself as the defining chronicler of his era, the preserver of life stories, the collector of paper scraps. You might say, based on his recollections of his sickly childhood, that he began life as a sensitive boy alert to the threat of physical extinction. In his work, he attached himself imaginatively to a family that would never die — the family of art history, in which he continues to hold a place of pride as its industrious and chatty paterfamilias.