'none of the modern fear of inaccuracy'

Much as we admire his progressive spirit and the catholicity of his taste, what gives the Lives their immortality is the quality of great passion that can be felt in every line, the fact that, apart from its value as a source of information, it is, above all, a true work of literature. Perhaps it was a good thing that in Vasari's time there was none of the modern fear of inaccuracy. If this always busy, always impatient, man had been required to spend much time on the verification of facts, he might have told us only one-tenth of what we now have . . .

—Alfred Werner, introduction to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1957)