Page from "Libro de' Disegni"

Giorgio Vasari with drawings by Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Raffaellino del Garbo (Sheets c. 1480–1504; mounting c. 1575–1590)

Album page with drawings in various media — metalpoint, pen and brown ink, brown and gray wash — on light buff paper

The Getty Museum

This composite album page is a surviving leaf from Giorgio Vasari's legendary Libro de' Disegni (Book of Drawings), the first major collection of master drawings assembled on historical principles. Multiple drawings by Florentine Renaissance artists — including Filippino Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, and Raffaellino del Garbo — are affixed to a large ivory-colored album page and enclosed within elaborately drawn architectural frames executed in pen and brown ink with gray wash, lending each drawing the appearance of a framed panel. The individual drawings, rendered in metalpoint on gray or mauve paper and heightened with white, depict figural studies including standing nude figures, portrait heads, and studies of hands. Vasari (1511–1574), painter, architect, and author of the foundational Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, assembled this collection both as a visual archive of the maniera of great masters and as a scholarly resource to accompany his biographies.