Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, art historian, and biographer who lived from the 30th of July 1511 to the 27th of June 1574. He is best known for his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects and is often called the first art historian.
Vasari's Lives, first published in 1550 and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, invented the genre of the artistic biography encyclopedia. It is regarded as the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing and is still cited in modern biographies of artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
Vasari described Giotto's new manner of painting as a rinascita, meaning rebirth in Italian. In his Histoire de France of 1835, the author Jules Michelet adopted this idea using the French term Renaissance, which then entered historiography and remains in use.
Vasari designed the loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno and the Vasari Corridor, a long passage connecting the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti across the river. The corridor runs along an arcade beside the Arno and crosses the Ponte Vecchio.
The Lives shows a consistent bias in favor of Florentines, crediting them with developments such as the invention of engraving and systematically ignoring Venetian art in the first edition. It also contains factual errors, such as claiming Andrea del Castagno killed Domenico Veneziano, although Andrea had died several years before Domenico.
Vasari died on the 27th of June 1574 in Florence, aged 62. He had been befriended by Michelangelo, whose style influenced his own, and he designed the Tomb of Michelangelo in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, completed in 1578.