His Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni,[8] published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art.

He was reared and educated by his maternal uncle, Francesco Angeloni, who was an antiquarian, writer of comedies, dialogues and operas, a numismatist (Historia Augusta, 1641) and collector of art, antiquities and natural history (he had Correggio, Bassano and Titian among his paintings).

Bellori was a close friend of many artists, including Nicolas Poussin, Giovanni Angelo Canini, François Duquesnoy, Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy and Carlo Maratta.

While serving Christina, he certainly met Filippo Baldinucci, the Florentine writer on art, who visited Rome in 1681 on the occasion of the Queen's commission to him for a biography of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Travellers' diaries and guidebooks confirm that Bellori had assembled a small but well-chosen gallery, with works attributed to Titian, Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Maratta and Annibale Carracci, amongst others.

His friend Carlo Maratta contributed funds for the posthumous publication of Bellori's Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte de Raffaelle d'Urbino (1696), which describes Raphael Rooms in the Apostolic Palace and the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche in the Villa Farnesina.

In 1672 he published this as a preface to his biographies of recent and contemporary artists, entitled: Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (The lives of the modern painters, sculptors, and architects).

[15] In Bellori's view, the Renaissance ideal had been rescued from the tangled post-Raphael and Michelangelo styles now known as Mannerism, by the robust classicism of those following Annibale Carracci's lead.

In Bellori's Lives the artists he most admired were Domenichino and Nicolas Poussin; his friend the sculptor Alessandro Algardi was praised while Bernini was not mentioned and he included the painters Andrea Sacchi and his pupil Carlo Maratta, however, he omitted Pietro da Cortona.

After Massimo's death in 1677, Bellori went on to catalogue rare coins in Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna's library, and then those belonging to Queen Christina of Sweden, for whom he also served as antiquario.

Ménestrier's one published work, a study of the image Ephesian Diana, based on examples in his own collection appeared close to twenty years after his death, also benefiting from Bellori's ministrations.