14. Filippo Baldanucci, Notice of the Professors of Design from Cimabue until Now, published from 1681, last volumes posthumously until 1728.

Baldanucci was the author of one of the most expansive collections of artist’s biographies. Like many of the other biographers, he took Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, both as a model and as a point of departure. Unlike Vasari, Baldanucci sought to cover Northern, Dutch, Flemish, French and German painters alongside his native Italians, aiming for a singularly universal and comprehensive history of art.

Baldanucci’s writing style is very animated and full of rhetorical flourishes. The biographies also often begin with a eulogistic tone that can last for pages, before recounting the artist’s life.

The broad range of artists covered in Baldanucci’s lives, deviates a little from the regional bias (campanilismo) of many other Italian biographers discussed. For example, his life of the famous seventeenth century sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, does not hold back in eulogistic praise for the artist who came to fame in Rome, but whose origins and influence were divorced from 
Baldanucci’s own Tuscan identity in Florence.

In other respects, the pull of regional identity is very evident within the Notice, with the origins of modern painting, very much seen as being birthed through the innovations of the Florentine painter Giotto. In Baldanucci’s introduction, we see the life of Giotto and his teacher Cimabue, employed to affirm Florences’ regional claim as the author of the Renaissance, in refutation of Malvasia’s recent assertion of artistic equality with Bologna.
 

          

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pluto Abducting Persephonie, marble, detail.