is often awkward. The more faithful the attempted
rendering, the more plainly must that awkwardness be reproduced.

Vasari's Introduction on Technique has not been included, because it has
no immediate connection with the Lives. In any case, there already
exists an adequate translation by Miss Maclehose. All Vasari's other
prefaces and introductions are given in the order in which they are
found in the edition of 1568.

With this much explanation, I may pass to personal matters, and record
my thanks to many Florentine friends for help in technical and
grammatical questions; to Professor Baldwin Brown for the notes on
technical matters printed with Miss Maclehose's translation of "Vasari
on Technique"; and to Mr. C. J. Holmes, of the National Portrait
Gallery, for encouragement in a task which has proved no less pleasant
than difficult.

G. DU C. DE V.

LONDON,
_March 1912_.

TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS AND MOST EXCELLENT SIGNOR COSIMO DE' MEDICI,
DUKE OF FLORENCE

MY MOST HONOURED LORD,

Seeing that your Excellency, following in this the footsteps of your
most Illustrious ancestors, and incited and urged by your own natural
magnanimity, ceases not to favour and to exalt every kind of talent,
wheresoever it may be found, and shows particular favour to the arts of
design, fondness for their craftsmen,[1] and understanding and delight
in their beautiful and rare works; I think that you cannot but take
pleasure in this labour which I have undertaken, of writing down the
lives, the works, the manners, and the circumstances of all those who,
finding the arts already dead, first revived them, then step by step
nourished and adorned them, and finally brought them to that height of
beauty and majesty whereon they stand at the present day. And because
these masters have been almost all Tuscans, and most of these
Florentines, of whom many have been incited and aided by your most
Illustrious ancestors with every kind of reward and honour to put
themselves to work, it may be said that in your state, nay, in your most
blessed house the arts were born anew, and that through the generosity
of your ancestors the world has recovered these most beautiful arts,
through which it has been ennobled and embellished.

Wherefore, through the debt which this age, these arts, and these
craftsmen owe to your ancestors, and to you as the heir of their virtue
and of their patronage of these professions, and through that