The new literary monument that can now be read in Catalan

BarcelonaMore often than not, it is small accidents and coincidences that end up yielding exceptional literary fruits. This is how the story that has led to the first Catalan translation of The Lives by Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511 - Florence, 1574) begins: every summer, the Valencian lawyer Martí Domínguez Pérez would take his family to Italy, where they would combine leisure with visits to museums and churches. "It was in 1979, while we were in Arezzo, that my father, a great lover of Italian culture, stopped at the window of a small bookstore where they had the nine volumes of the Sansoni edition of The Lives, where Vasari was written in huge letters, as if he were a rock star. My father hesitated whether or not to buy that edition, which cost 20,000 pesetas. It was a significant amount of money at the time," recalls his son, the writer and biologist Martí Domínguez i Romero, author of novels such as Mater (Proa, 2022) and essays such as The Dream of Lucretius (Pòrtic, 2013).

Domínguez senior not only paid the money but also read with great enjoyment the thousands of pages of Vasari's The Lives

and, not long after, he dared to translate some of the almost 200 biographies of artists that make it up, such as those of Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo. The experience satisfied him so much that, once he had retired, he made a risky and honorable decision: to translate that ambitious work entirely into Catalan and accompany it with an extensive and dazzling array of notes. "He spent about twenty years on it – his son continues –. Almost towards the end, at home we noticed he was losing strength. It was a complicated job and he was getting old." A stroke abruptly ended the life of Domínguez, who, nevertheless, had had time to complete more than 3,000 pages of the project. Only the writing of a few hundred notes remained pending, a task that his son took on. "I had to abandon some literary idea I had in hand to finish The Lives", states Martí Domínguez, with the three volumes of the Proa edition close at hand. They arrive in bookstores this Wednesday.

A fundamental work

In the book presentation, which took place at the Frederic Marès Museum in Barcelona, Domínguez is accompanied by a trio of expert voices on both Vasari's figure and work. "Lives" of Vasari is a fundamental work of European culture – argues Emili Rosales, general director of Grup 62, to which Proa belongs–. It is the first history and chronicle of Italian art between the 13th and 16th centuries. When you delve into it and don't worry too much about the knowledge the book contains, you find a series of fictionalized lives of artists, where human passions abound, that is, the fears, aspirations, and failures of each of them." The gallerist Artur Ramon also has words of praise for Vasari: "He appeared at a time when the Renaissance was dying out, and the subsequent Mannerism would eventually give way to the Baroque. Vasari, who was also an architect and painter, wrote Lives" a few years after the death of Raphael and Leonardo and while Michelangelo was still alive. Nevertheless, his contribution, which is that of an encyclopedist avant la lettre, allows for the creation of a canon of art divided into three parts: the first, which starts with Cimabue, reaches the end of the Trecento; the second covers the entire Quattrocento and includes Donatello, Piero della Francesca, and Sandro Botticelli; the third, which is the most important, begins with Leonardo and progresses to his favorite artist, Michelangelo, to whom he dedicates more pages than to any other."

Cultural journalist Sílvia Colomé highlights "the great value" of a book like "Lives", which Vasari first published in 1550 and expanded in 1567: it was this second edition that Martí Domínguez Pérez used for the Catalan translation of a "timely and essential" book written with the intention "that the artists who preceded him would not fall into oblivion" and, at the same time, to "vindicate the names of artists at a time in history when creators ceased to be anonymous". Colomé praises the work of Grup 62 and Proa for having put such a triple volume into circulation and wonders how it has taken "almost five centuries" to read it in Catalan.

"For a few decades now, we have been translating the great monuments of universal literature, and right now there are few works of the magnitude of "Les vides that are missing," comments Rosales, before citing some of the most ambitious projects published by Proa in recent years, including the three volumes of Montaigne's "Essays", translated by Vicent Alonso and published between 2006 and 2008, and Dante Alighieri's "Divina Comèdia", versioned by Joan F. Mira in 2001. In the last decade, we have also seen the first Catalan translation made directly from Russian of "Guerra i pau", by Lev Tolstoi", by Judit Díaz Barneda (Edicions de 1984, 2023); new versions of the "Ilíada" and "Odissea", by Pau Sabaté, for the "Bernat Metge Universal" (2019 and 2026); Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" for Adesiara, signed by Carles Llorach-Freixes (2025), and the more than 2,000 pages, spread over four volumes, of Thomas Mann's "Josep i els seus germans", translated by Ramon Monton for Comanegra (2025-2026). In parallel, Josep M. Pinto has completed the seven volumes of "A la recerca del temps perdut", by Marcel Proust", which Viena has published between 2009 and 2022.

"Reading the version of "Les vides

" my father made, you will find the harmony and lyricism of Vasari," assures Martí Domínguez. "Unlike what André Chastel did in the French translation, which modernized the language and even changed the punctuation, my father wanted to maintain the prosody and also the musicality of the author." He also tried to be more faithful than the Spanish translations he consulted. "In one of them, instead of referring to nets for catching birds, it read cages for birds," he recalls. "And in another, instead of making the fig [Valencian expression meaning to make a rude gesture], they opted for hacer un mohín [to make a grimace]."