Vasari's Vite and Italian artists in sixteenth century England

Vasari’s Vite provide valuable information about the way in which Italian art reached England, sometimes mentioning specific names of merchants and agents controlling the market. The migration of artists could in fact only occur with the backing of merchant-bankers who provided the financial means to undertake such costly and difficult trips, guaranteed a certain amount of work and in many cases even provided housing in their own company lodgings. The paper presents new archival evidence confirming the correctness of the leads offered in the Vite and argues that the movement of work and people was largely in the hands of a group of Florentine merchants with very close ties to the Medici in Florence and Rome.