Editing Filippo Baldinucci

{{Short description|Italian art historian and biographer (1625–1696)}}
{{About|the author|a list of artists featured in the ''Notizie ...''|Artists in biographies by Filippo Baldinucci}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2016}}
'''Filippo Baldinucci''' (3 June 1625 &ndash; 10 January 1696)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/filippo-baldinucci_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/|title=BALDINUCCI, Filippo|website=Traccani|publisher=Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani|access-date=7 January 2019}}</ref> was an Italian art historian and biographer.
[[File:Filippo Baldinucci.jpg|thumb|Filippo Baldinucci]]

==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)

==Works==
*''Comminciamento e progresso dell'arte dell'intagliare in rame colle vite di molti de' più eccellenti maestri della stessa professione...''<ref>"Commencement and progress of the art of copper engraving, with the lives of the most excellent masters of the same profession..."</ref> Florence 1667 and further editions. Baldinucci's engraving forms the frontispiece. This contains the first mention in Italy of [[Rembrandt]]'s prints.
*''Vocabolario toscano dell'arte del disegno''<ref>In full: ''Vocabolario Toscano dell'Arte del Disegno, nel quale si explicano i propri termini e voci, non solo della Pittura, Scultura, & Architettura; ma ancora di altre Arti a quelle subordinate, e che abbiano per fondamento il Disegno''. "Tuscan vocabulary of the art of design, in which are explained the particular words and expressions, not only of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but also of the other arts subordinate to them and which we possess fundamentally in Design" ([http://www.ilab.org/db/book2019_749.html First edition described]{{dead link|date=November 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }})</ref> Florence 1681. Reprinted 1976.
*''[[Artists in biographies by Filippo Baldinucci]]'' 6 vols,  Florence 1681–1728, published in part posthumously. A second edition in six volumes with additional materials was edited by A. Matteoli (1725–30) and was reprinted in Rome, 1975.
*''Vita del cav. Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Lettera a Vinc. Capponi, Veglia sulle Belle Arti, Lezione accademica''<ref>"Life of Cavalier [[Gian Lorenzo Bernini]]; letters to Vincenzo Capponi; Survey of the Fine Arts: lecture to the [[Accademia della Crusca]]".</ref> were collected and appended to the second volume of his ''Notizie'', 1682.

=='Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial'==
'''Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial''' is the title of a poem by [[Robert Browning]] from his 1876 collection, ''[[Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper]]''.  It is based on an anecdote contained in Baldinucci's life of the artist Lodovico Buti.

==Notes==
{{Reflist|2}}

==References==
{{Wikiquote}}
*{{Cite EB1911|wstitle=Baldinucci, Filippo|volume=3|page=243}}<!--the current article is no longer based on EB 1911-->
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20060917233328/http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=390 (Getty Museum) ''Portrait of a man'', red and black chalk]
*Schlosser-Magnino, Julius. ''La letteratura artistica'' Rev. ed. 1935
*Ernst Gombrich "Kunstliteratur", in ''Atlantisbuch der Kunst'' 1952 ([http://www.library.yale.edu/art/ehgkl1.html On-line English translation])

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Baldinucci, Filippo}}
[[Category:1625 births]]
[[Category:Writers from Florence]]
[[Category:Italian biographers]]
[[Category:Italian art historians]]
[[Category:Italian art critics]]
[[Category:1696 deaths]]
[[Category:Biographers of artists]]
[[Category:17th-century biographers]]
[[Category:Writers from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany]]