Baldinucci's Apologia and Florentine claims to be cradle of the Renaissance

Baldinucci's Apologia interrupts the expected logical sequence of the opening chapters of his Notizie : it is reasonable to ask why Baldinucci chose to digress in this way, how he set about writing the Apologia , and how fruitful an endeavour it was. Baldinucci's own account of why he wrote the Apologia indicates that he did so out of loyalty to his country, to the ruling political and cultural establishment, and to his own artistic vision. Thereafter, Baldinucci sets out his case for regarding the two great Florentine artists, Cimabue and Giotto, as having been responsible for rescuing the noble art of painting from the degraded state into which it had fallen, basing his argument on over seventy quotations from literary, historical, art‐historical, and other sources, and thus firmly rebutting the opposing view put forward by his opponent, Malvasia, who saw Bologna rather than Florence as the true fons et origo of art's revival. As to his methodology, internal evidence points to a search of the indexes and relevant works (both printed and manuscript) in the Laurentian Library, reinforced by guidance from previous writers and from sympathetic contemporaries. The result of Baldinucci's labours was to silence rather than refute the opposition to his central thesis; the Apologia's value today chiefly resides in the way in which it illustrates the importance attached in Baldinucci's day to artistic achievement as a major constituent of local patriotism, and in providing an impressive conspectus of Italian literature, and of a significant swathe of European historical writing, of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.