Filippo Baldinucci

[5] For Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, brother of Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and a scholar and patron of the arts, he began as bookkeeper in 1664 and developed, after the Cardinal's death, into virtually the curator of the Grand Ducal collections.

This meticulous work was based on an ability to distinguish between the hands of different painters—an idea then new and untested, and one that opened up the field of connoisseurship that enabled the attributions of Italian drawings, which are generally unsigned.

He studied closely the stylistic debts of the great masters to one another, and in this, and his meticulous use of documentation and archives, he was centuries ahead in the discipline of art history.

Educated at a Jesuit school, he was intensely pious—before marrying, he completed the whole of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises to discover whether he should in fact devote himself to a single life.

He had great appreciation of the Baroque, and wrote in a periodic style which reflected it, each phrase opening from the preceding, full of periphrasis and other flourishes of rhetoric, though flowing.