Estratto delle Vite de' Pittori di Giorgio Vasari, per ciò che Concerne Arezzo

In 1764 Giovanni Francesco de' Giudici completed a manuscript, now kept in the State Archives of Pisa, that we can quite properly consider a fundamental text in the history of the Arezzo artistic learning, beginning with the rich information supplied by Giorgio Vasari. This volume proposes the complete publication of the manuscript, a much characteristic document of the cult of the various memories that, after the impulse of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, spread in Italy in the heart of the eighteenth century, and also in the field of the history of art lead to a quick widening of knowledge.
The researches have shed light on the figure of Giovanni Francesco de' Giudici, a local erudite that we can follow since his education with father Lagomarsini, a glory of the convent of the Jesuits of Arezzo, in order then to see him collaborating with Lorenzo Guazzasi and Giacinto Fossombroni to look for information about the ancient and medieval Arezzo through the reorder of its city archives. Among the initiatives of this group of cultured people appears also the second edition of the Ragionamenti of Giorgio Vasari and the publication of other unknown reports concerning Arezzo.
The De' Giudici then, this time with the collaboration of Tommaso Gentili and the painter Ignazio Hugford, undertakes a new edition of the Lifes of Vasari, the fifth, begun in Livorno in 1767 and finished in Florence in 1772, three years after his death.