Die Notizie de’ Professori del disegno von Filippo Baldinucci: Verwissenschaftlichung kunsthistorischen Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert

Filippo Baldinucci, a painter and savvy connoisseur of art, intensively examined the question of historiographical writing. With his monumental collection of biographies, Notizie de’ Professori del disegno (1681-1728), he distanced himself from biographical literature oriented toward Vasari’s Vite, and wrote a scholarly, well-founded European history of art adhering to encyclopedic standards with a source-critical and scholarly basis. A close reading of the Notizie shows that Baldinucci did not intend to provide a follow-up to the Vite: He finds harsh words for Vasari, and even though he shares his notion of the primacy of the arts, he leaves Vasari’s teleological model based on normative stipulations of a history of progress behind him.