Filippo Baldinucci
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Filippo Baldinucci (1625–1697), Italian writer on the history of the arts, was born at Florence. Baldinucci's whole works were published in fourteen volumes at Milan, 1808–1812. His most important work was Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua. As well as writing he worked as a draftsman and clay modeler. He died in 1697.
Patronised by the Medici, Baldinucci made a name as one of Italy's leading connossieurs. His work recataloguing and adding to the Medici collections, first of drawings and then of paintings, was groundbreaking, using new ideas about organisation and completeness to make these the most modern collections of the time—collections in large part the foundation of the Uffizi's art holdings.
This meticulous work was based on an ability to distinguish between the hands of different painters—an idea then new and untested.
His "Notizie" grew from this; intended to build upon the work of Giorgio Vasari, it was the first art history to trace the lives and work of artists not only of one region (Vasari was predjudiced towards Tuscan artists) but all Italy, and indeed beyond. He studied closely the stylistic debts of the great masters to one another, and in this, and his meticulous use of documentation and archives, he was centuries ahead in the discipline of art history.
Baldinucci was very much a man of his time, of the counter-reformation and of the Baroque. Educated at a Jesuit school, he was intensely pious—before marrying, he completed the whole of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual excercises to discover whether he should in fact devote himself to a single life. Three of his sons went into the church, and one, Antonio, was a Jesuit missionary later beatified.
He had great appreciation of the Baroque, and wrote in a style which reflected it, flowery and ornate, though flowing. His understanding of art stemmed largely from his religion, for he believed that it came as divine inspiration into special lives, the lives of the artists he so painstakingly recorded.sv:Filippo Baldinucci