Carlo Dolci was born about the year 1616. His father was a highly respected tailor of Florence, Andrea Dolci by name, his mother a daughter of Pietro Marinari, a painter (says Baldinucci) of repute. Carlo's parents seem to have been an exemplary couple, who earned the esteem of all who knew them and raised a family of five children to follow the straight and narrow paths of probity. Carlo is said to have been born on the 25th of May 1616, a day devoted to the honour of St. Zenobius and Santa Maria Maddalena de Pazzi. The elder Dolci died when Carlo was four years old, and his mother was left in straitened circumstances, with which she struggled bravely and not without success. Carlo seems to have been in every respect a model boy; in fact, if his biographer is strictly reliable, he was almost too good for the wicked world he lived in. It would be a relief to hear that he had moments when he was not on his best behaviour, that he robbed orchards, or played truant, or got into one or other of the scrapes that are associated with boyhood; but, alas, he did nothing of the kind. He was not even content to be good, but wanted all his schoolfellows to follow his example, and used to persuade them to tell their beads and say their prayers even when they were out walking.
At the early age of nine Carlo Dolci gave unmistakable signs of possessing an artist's gifts, and was entrusted by his mother to the care of Jacopo Vignali and Matteo Rosselli. He worked very hard under these masters, and was so good that Mr. Barlow of "Sandford and Merton" fame would have been moved to tears of joy had he belonged to the seventeenth century and flourished in the neighbourhood of Florence, while Master Harry Sandford would have hidden a diminished head and confessed that he had found a greater saint than himself. At the age of eleven Carlo Dolci painted his first heads of Christ, one as a child, and the other crowned with thorns; he also painted a full-length figure of St. John. Then he painted a portrait of his mother, who was so pleased with the work that she took it to his master's studio, where, as good luck would have it, Pietro de Medici was in the habit of passing some of his idle hours. This patron of the arts was so pleased with the boy's work that he ordered a portrait of himself and another of a friend, the musician Antonio Landini. He also took the pictures that little Carlo had just painted and showed them to the leaders of society in Florence, presenting the young artist to the duke, who could hardly believe that the work before him had been accomplished by one so young. In order to assure himself, he told the boy to sketch two heads in his presence, only to be so pleased with the work that he rewarded him handsomely for it.