Filippo Baldinucci
Filippo Baldinucci (3 June 1625 – 10 January 1696)[1] was an Italian art historian and biographer.
Life
Baldinucci is considered
His biography of Gian Lorenzo Bernini was published in 1682.[4]
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
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,[6] and applied some of his terms to "bad" art.
From this grew his Notizie, in which he consciously intended to build upon the
In his Vocabolario (1681) he presented terms of art and technical terms, not only for the
In other ways Baldinucci was very much a man of his time, of the
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...[7] 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[8] Florence 1681. Reprinted 1976.
- Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, 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[9] 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
- ^ "BALDINUCCI, Filippo". Traccani. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Retrieved 7 January 2019.
- ^ See Gombrich reference.
- ^ "Notices of professors of design from Cimabue to now"
- ^ "His biography of Bernini (1682) is the most important source on this dominant master of the age of the Baroque." (Ernst Gombrich "Kunstliteratur").
- ^ Others, dispersed at auction, are in various collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum.
- ^ According to the census compiled by Philip Sohm, in Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- ^ "Commencement and progress of the art of copper engraving, with the lives of the most excellent masters of the same profession..."
- ^ 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" (First edition described[permanent dead link])
- ^ "Life of Cavalier Gian Lorenzo Bernini; letters to Vincenzo Capponi; Survey of the Fine Arts: lecture to the Accademia della Crusca".
References
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 243.
- (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 (On-line English translation)