Best remembered today as the biographer of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, Vasari began his career in Florence as a pupil of del Sarto. In the early 1540s, Vasari found employment making copies and original works for the Medici Family, who owned the original version of this painting. Ottaviano de’ Medici is known to have commissioned a copy of a del Sarto work, possibly this one, and it is likely that he would have turned to del Sarto’s pupil Vasari to paint this version.