The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, often simply known as The Lives, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art",Max Marmor, Kunstliteratur, translated by Ernst Gombrich, in Art Documentation Vol 11 # 1, 1992 "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "the first important book on art history".

((male) or (female), literally "Most Excellent Sir/Madam") an honorific prefix that is traditionally applied to certain people in Spain and certain Spanish-speaking countries.