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 that of the compelling Renaissance invention, the artist.