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.