Not much is known about the years Bernardino Poccetti (1553–1612) spent growing up in Michele Tosini's (1503–1577) shop. Filippo Baldinucci (1625–1696) claimed that the painter stayed with Tosini for a long time, but he did not provide any precise dates that would flesh out Poccetti's activities during this period. The records show that Poccetti paid dues to the Accademia del Disegno as early as 1570. A few years later, in 1574, he rented a workshop on Via del Palagio, where he remained until 1578. These slight archival references suggest that it was in the early 1570s that Poccetti, who would have been twenty years old in 1573, left Tosini's bottega and struck out on his own. If Bernardino did enter Tosini's workshop when he was seven or eight years old, which would have been around the year 1560, then he would have been in his late teens when he set out to establish his own career after having spent around ten years working alongside Tosini. This span of time is longer than the usual apprenticeship of six or seven years. It appears, however, that Girolamo Macchietti (1535–1592) spent a similarly long period of time as an apprentice to Tosini, so it may have been a typical practice of that particular workshop. At seven or eight years of age, Poccetti would have been two or three years younger than the typical apprentice—a youthfulness that Baldinucci emphasized in the painter's biography.