Michelangelo praised the work for endowing artists with immortality. Vasari's shrewd judgments and his precise pinpointing of the emotions aroused by individual works of art bear out his prediction that Vasari would have a worldwide influence on the history of art.

Volume One includes the lives of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and fourteen more.