In April of 2021, as this book was well underway and the world was in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, renovations undertaken at the Uffizi revealed two frescoed portraits of Medici rulers by the hand of Bernardino Barbatelli, now known as Bernardino Poccetti (1553–1612). By almost any measure, Poccetti was one of the most successful fresco painters in late sixteenth-century Florence, and however serendipitous this discovery might have been, it is by no means surprising. Poccetti and his workshop painted an impressive number of monuments for a wide range of patrons throughout the city, an achievement that did not escape the attention of the painter's earliest biographer, Filippo Baldinucci (1625–1696). In his discussion of Poccetti published in the Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in quà (6 vols., 1681–1728), Baldinucci remarked that it would be an ‘impossible task’ (‘cosa impossibile’) to describe the entire oeuvre of this prolific Florentine painter, and so he warned his reader that he would limit himself to mentioning ‘only a few, indeed very few, and almost none’ of Poccetti's many paintings in Florence and elsewhere. In this respect, the seventeenth-century biographer was neither shirking his duty nor overstating the case, for Poccetti and his collaborators executed an impressive number of commissions. At the close of the eighteenth century, Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810) echoed Baldinucci's description, remarking that although his work on panel or canvas was rare, Poccetti's frescoes could be found in ‘nearly every corner in Florence’ (‘pressochè in ogni angolo di Firenze’).