Baldinucci, Filippo

Baldinucci, Filippo (b Florence, 3 June 1625; d Florence, 1 Jan. 1696).
Italian writer, collector, and amateur artist. His major work is Notizie de' professori del disegno (6 vols., 1681–1728; the last published posthumously), an encyclopedic collection of artists' biographies from Cimabue to his own time. It constitutes a kind of updating and expansion of Vasari's Lives and is particularly valuable for the information it gives about 16th-century Florentine artists and Baldinucci's contemporaries. He was an innovator as an art historian in making use of every kind of document. Apart from the Notizie, his most important work is his biography of Bernini (1682), the primary source for the artist's life. He wrote several other books, including a history of engraving and etching (1686), which contains one of the earliest accounts of Rembrandt's life (his information was supplied by Bernhard Keil, a former pupil of Rembrandt).