Florentine art historian, the first to make full use of documents and to realize the importance of drawings in the study of painting.

Working for Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, Baldinucci advised on the acquisition of the great collection of drawings now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. His Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua . . . (1681–1728; “Report on Drawing Teachers from Cimabue to the Present”) is his most notable work, often correcting and completing the work of Giorgio Vasari. Baldinucci also wrote an important study of the life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.