Giorgio Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany in 1511 and became one of the most influential art historians of the Renaissance. He worked as a painter and architect throughout his career, but is best remembered for his biographical work Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which he compiled and published during his lifetime. Vasari's Lives is considered the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing. The work covers many of the most important Italian Renaissance artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and remains widely cited in modern biographies and art historical scholarship. However, scholars have since identified numerous factual errors in Vasari's accounts, particularly regarding artists from periods before his own birth. Vasari spent much of his later life in Florence, where he died in 1574. Despite the inaccuracies that modern scholarship has uncovered, his pioneering approach to documenting and interpreting the lives and works of artists established a model for art history that continues to influence the discipline today.