text:  The history of modern art owes no doubt much to Vasari; he leads us from its cradle to its maturity with the anxious diligence of a nurse; but he likewise has her derelictions: for more loquacious than ample and less discriminating styles than eager to accumulate descriptions he is at an early period exhausted by the superlatives lavished on inferior claims and forced into frigid rhapsodies and astrologic nonsense to do justice to the greater