The Delight of Art offers a highly original, erudite interpretation of Vasari's Lives, one of the most influential texts on the arts. David Cast approaches Vasari's long, tripartite work as a complex rhetorical history rather than as an archival document mined for facts about the artists. He focuses on the delight Vasari mentions in his accounts of viewers' responses to works by artists from Giotto to Michelangelo. Cast finds in delight what might be called a threshold into the arena where the cultural and social orders met to produce a sphere of subjectivity as well as...