It is said that the Italian Renaissance began when the artist Cimabue attempted to swat a fly off a painting. In Giorgio Vasari’s <em>Lives</em> (1550), he recounts the moment Cimabue realised his apprentice Giotto di Bondone, who in fact had painted the bothersome fly, surpassed him.<sup>1</sup><br><br>The lifelike insect struck a sharp contrast to master Cimabue’s idealised figures, executed in the dominant Byzantine style. For Vasari, the fly was symbolic of something more than the young Giotto’s artistry: for him it was the act that ushered in the Italian Renaissance,<sup>2</sup> with its turn towards realism through the development of illusionistic techniques; Giotto’s fly was a clear break from the Byzantine past.<br><br>But close inspection of this anecdote reveals that Vasari may have exercised a certain degree of artistic licence in its formulation. <em>Lives</em> paints a distinctive picture of the Italian Renaissance, with a tendency to overstate the achievements of Florentine artists. Vasari places Giotto (a Florentine) at the forefront of the Renaissance. However, the fly, in fact, may be a false anecdote, having a parallel in Pliny the Elder’s tale of the Ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, whose realistically painted grapes fooled birds into pecking them. It appears as though Vasari was putting into practice the main endeavour of the Renaissance: the revival and the surpassing of the achievements of classical antiquity.<br><br>Zeuxis’ grapes had only fooled birds; Giotto’s fly had fooled Cimabue. In the context of Vasari’s <em>Lives</em>, the fly becomes a device for communicating an ideology of the Renaissance.<br><br>