Editing Filippo Baldinucci (section)

==Life==
Baldinucci is considered<ref>See Gombrich reference.</ref> among the most significant [[Florence|Florentine]] biographers/historians of the artists and the arts of the [[Baroque]] period. Patronised by the [[Medici]], he aspired to become the new [[Giorgio Vasari|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, ''[[Artists in biographies by Filippo Baldinucci]]'',<ref>"Notices of professors of design from [[Cimabue]] to now"</ref> of which the publication began in 1681 and continued after his death.

His biography of [[Gian Lorenzo Bernini]] was published in 1682.<ref>"His biography of Bernini (1682) is the most important source on this dominant master of the age of the Baroque." ([[Ernst Gombrich]] "Kunstliteratur").</ref>

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]].<ref>Others, dispersed at auction, are in various collections including the [[J. Paul Getty Museum]].</ref> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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,<ref>According to the census compiled by Philip Sohm, in ''Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy'' (Cambridge University Press, 2001).</ref> and applied some of his terms to "bad" art.

From this grew his ''Notizie'', in which he consciously intended to build upon the ''[[Vite]]'' of [[Giorgio Vasari]]; Baldinucci's was the first [[art history]] to trace the lives and work of artists not only of one region (Vasari was prejudiced 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.

In his ''Vocabolario'' (1681) he presented terms of art and technical terms, not only for the [[fine arts]] but for goldsmith's work, ''[[pietre dure]]'', color pigments and tools.

In other ways Baldinucci was very much a man of his time, of the [[Counter-Reformation]] and of the Baroque. Educated at a [[Society of Jesus|Jesuit]] school, he was intensely pious&mdash;before marrying, he completed the whole of [[Ignatius of Loyola]]'s ''Spiritual Exercises'' to discover whether he should in fact devote himself to a single life. Three of his sons went into the church, and one, [[Anthony Baldinucci|Antonio]], was a Jesuit missionary later beatified.

He had great appreciation of the [[Baroque]], and wrote in a periodic style which reflected it, each phrase opening from the preceding, full of [[periphrasis]] and other flourishes of [[rhetoric]], 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.

Baldinucci's son wrote the first biography of his father; Baldinucci's notes are conserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (MSS Fondo Nazionale II.II.110)