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Concept
Filippo Baldinucci
Summary
Filippo Baldinucci (3 June 1625 – 10 January 1696) was an Italian art historian and biographer.
Baldinucci is considered among the most significant Florentine biographers/historians of the artists and the arts of the Baroque period. Patronised by the Medici, he aspired to become the new Vasari by renewing and expanding his biographies of artists, to which Baldinucci added lives of French and Flemish artists omitted by Vasari. His most important work was this biographical dictionary of artists, Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, of which the publication began in 1681 and continued after his death.
His biography of Gian Lorenzo Bernini was published in 1682.
Baldinucci came from a prominent and wealthy family of the Florentine merchant elite. As well as writing he drew portraits in chalk and modeled in clay; many of his deft and lively chalk portraits of friends are in the collection of the Uffizi. For Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, brother of Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and a scholar and patron of the arts, he began as bookkeeper in 1664 and developed, after the Cardinal's death, into virtually the curator of the Grand Ducal collections. In this way Baldinucci made a name as one of Italy's leading connoisseurs. 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, and one that opened up the field of connoisseurship that enabled the attributions of Italian drawings, which are generally unsigned. In his Vocabolario, the first dictionary of artistic terms, Baldinucci provided fourteen definitions of style using eighty different terms, and applied some of his terms to "bad" art.
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