Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giorgio Vasari, a sixteenth-century Italian painter and architect, wrote the Lives. The first edition was published in 1550 in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino and dedicated to Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Vasari published two editions with substantial differences between them: the first in 1550 in two volumes, and the second in 1568 in three volumes. The second edition is the one usually translated and referred to, and it gave significantly more attention to Venetian art, including a biography of Titian.
Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies, a form that continues today. The Vite has been described as the most important work of Renaissance biography of artists and the most influential single text for the history of Renaissance art.
Vasari has been criticized for excessive emphasis on Florentine art and the systematic neglect of Venetian and other European artists. John Symonds wrote in 1899 that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places and failing to verify his assertions. Modern research has corrected many of his dates and attributions.
Eliza Foster, publishing as Mrs. Jonathan Foster, produced the first English translation, issued by Henry George Bohn in 1850-51 in six volumes with careful annotations. According to professor Patricia Rubin of New York University, Foster's translation brought the Lives to a wide English-language readership for the first time.
The Vite became a model for encyclopedias of artist biographies in other countries. Karel Van Mander in 1604, Joachim von Sandrart in 1675, and Antonio Palomino in 1724 each produced national equivalents and were called the Vasari of their respective countries. The work was translated wholly or partially into Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.