The book is a genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies. It includes a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. The work has a consistent and notorious favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored. It is one of the basic sources for information on the Renaissance in Italy.