was later replicated in other biographies by Milizia and Nagler, except with numerous factual errors. This may be due, in part, to the lack of documentation regarding Pirro Ligorio's life. The first thirty years of his life, for example, remain almost entirely a mystery. Additionally, many of Ligorio's designs, drawings, and buildings were destroyed over the years, making documentation of his work even more difficult. In the twentieth century, historian David Coffin wrote his dissertation on the life of Ligorio and quickly became the world's foremost expert on the architect. Coffin's book, Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian, remains the most valuable and complete account of Ligorio's life and works. In the Epilogue of his book, Coffin describes Ligorio's personality as having three main traits: curiosity, imagination, and ambition. His curiosity led him to pursue a multitude of projects and interests, including painting, garden design, engineering, gardening, cartography, and archaeology. His imagination can be seen in the groundbreaking marriage of botany, sculpture, waterworks, and mythology found in the gardens at Tivoli. Finally, his ambition: Ligorio pursued his chosen fields with great focus and fervor, gaining admirers as well as detractors along the way. In particular, Ligorio found an enemy in fellow Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari, who refused to include a biography of Ligorio in his Vite. This had a significant impact on the immortalization of Ligorio's legacy, and left his life much less documented compared to his contemporaries. Notes References Coffin, David R. Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Coffin, David R. Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. David R. Coffin. "Ligorio, Pirro." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed February 12, 2016, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T051048. MORTII MA-TII The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Pirro Ligorio." Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed February 12, 2016. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Pirro-Ligorio. Vasari, Giorgio, and De Vere Gaston Du C. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. External links Pirro Ligorio – a biography from the landscape architecture and gardens guide 1510s births 1583 deaths 16th-century Neapolitan people 16th-century Italian architects Architects from Naples 16th-century Italian painters Italian male painters Italian antiquarians Italian Mannerist architects Italian Mannerist painters