The lavish brushstroke and narrative language had however been an important part of Boschi's work even before he went to the Urbe. On his return to Florence in 1606, the artist introduced a new level of compositional splendour which, with powerful contrasts of light, reveals how he had absorbed the opulent style of Rubens and the naturalism of Caravaggio. It is no coincidence that in 1962 Mina Gregori referred to Boschi as a veritable "proto-Baroque" painter.

Many of his works from the first decade of the seventeenth century - many of them never displayed before - take up this dramatic solemnity, while in the following decade the artist, who was now well established in the circle of city commissions, gradually played down certain naturalistic distortions in favour of a gentler, more Florentine style of narrative.

An extraordinary draughtsman in the finest local tradition, he has left us a corpus that is prodigious in both number and, to an even greater degree, quality. Boschi formulated his works with great care and also in his graphics he reveals an uncommon versatility, which led him to experiment all the techniques then in use - from pencil to pen, watercolour, charcoal, pastel and chalk.

From the beginning of the third decade to the end of the fourth, when he received prestigious commissions and made many works, Boschi's style - whether in frescoes or on canvas and panel - never loses its narrative skill, acquiring an increasingly varied and colourful palette, and an attention to detail - in his objects and fabrics - that reveals his artistic vicinity to younger masters such as Giovanni Bilivert, Matteo Rosselli and their pupils.

In this period, his painting also underwent significant morphological changes with the figures becoming increasingly elongated and sinuous, elegant in their majestic, striding gait, stunningly beautiful in the radiance of their faces.

Curated by scholar Ricardo Spinelli, a specialist in seventeenth-century Florence, this exhibition comes in the wake of other initiatives by Casa Buonarroti to rediscover those seventeenth-century painters who worked for Michelangelo the Younger (Artemisia Gentileschi, Cecco Bravo). It illustrates the development of the art of Fabrizio Boschi from his debut, with paintings dating from the late Cinquecento, right through to the end of his career, with a significant sample of his work as a painter and, at the same time, with drawings that provide information about works that are lost or that, like frescoes, cannot be moved.

Visitors will be able to admire twenty paintings and over thirty exquisite drawings, most of which have never been shown before.

This event recognises the role that the artist played in Florentine art in the early years of the seventeenth century, when Boschi was the unchallenged leader and an early exponent of the most modern Baroque language, intelligently oriented towards the culture of the city. He was indeed an artificer of "magnificent ideas" expressed with "nobility of style", as his biographer Filippo Baldinucci wrote of him.