A number of Waldman's publications employ a combination of archival research and connoisseurship to identify and reconstruct the careers of previously anonymous artists of the Renaissance.
The official endorsement of their discovery by Hungary's Minister of Culture in a much publicized press conference made debate difficult for by Hungarian academics and curators.
In the spring of 2008 Waldman identified a painting of the Annunciation in a provincial museum of Hungary, the Móra Ferenc Múzeum in Szeged, as the work of Giorgio Vasari.
The controversy received considerable public attention after Waldman, writing in the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in 2009, presented a preparatory drawing made by Vasari for the painting (now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) and identified it on the basis of documents as part of the lost decorations for the Chapel of St. Michael in the Torre Pia of the Vatican, which Vasari painted for Pope Pius V in 1570-71.
Waldman's early childhood, and in particular their relationship with their troubled and abusive father (who died when he was nine) is discussed in a memoir by their sister Sharon Harrigan, Playing with Dynamite (Truman State University Press, 2017).