The Notebook of Designs by Filippo Baldi at the Getty Research Institute

Abstract

Many unanswered questions persist about the life and career of Filippo Baldi, an architect active in Pistoia in the early eighteenth century. A notebook of Baldi’s sketches at the Getty Research Institute clarifies aspects of his identity, elucidates the complexity of his style, and unshrouds some of the mystery that characterizes the architectural history of this period in Pistoia. Baldi’s notebook (ca. 1697–1733) contains 178 drawings in pen and ink pasted onto leaves in a vellum binding that held an original manuscript; several of the drawings are signed and dated. While the Palazzo Amati, Palazzo Marchetti, and the facade of the Santa Maria degli Angeli are three outstanding examples of his built architecture, the notebook at the GRI offers insight into other projects that may have remained on paper. In addition to drawings of interior decorations and church furnishings, there are a few studies of Roman architecture, especially structures with a Jesuit connection—suggesting that Baldi may have belonged to the Jesuit order—and projects for not only the Pistoia area but also Arezzo and Romagna.