Until a few decades ago, not even the name of Agostino Melissi appeared in the inventories of the Prints and Drawings Room of the Uffizi. This was rather unusual considering that in his Notizie dei Professori del Disegno Filippo Baldinucci, curator of the enormous collection of Cardinal Leopoldo dei Medici which is the founding nucleus of the present collection, had dedicated to this artist who had trained at the school of Giovanni Bilivert expressions of praise that extended to his work as a draftsman. It was from the late 1970s onwards, and the identification of various sheets having certain connections with his well-documented activity for the Medici tapestry factory, that drawings by Melissi began to emerge, particularly, though not exclusively, from the portfolios of Bilivert. These works gradually came to express a distinct and original artistic personality, one whose individuality was clearly felt in the context of 17th-century Florentine draftsmanship. The fact that the vast majority of new discoveries regarded sheets from the Uffizi is at the basis of the present work, which aims to gather together and give order to material that now amounts to dozens of works scattered under the names of various artists.