His father died when Antonio was a young man, and he worked briefly in the studio of Matteo Roselli, but was apprenticed to a goldsmith in Ponto Vecchio.

[2] There he worked in this capacity until his fortieth year, until Michele Ermini, librarian to Cardinal de' Medici, recognized his academic ability and taught him Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

He was nicknamed the Enciclopedic, the animated Library, a literary glutton (Divoratore di Libri), and the most rational of bibliomaniacs, inasmuch as he read everything he bought.

The story goes that one day in pointing out the Palazzo Riccardi to a stranger he said, "Here the new birth of learning took place," and then turning to the college of the Jesuits, "There they have come back to bury it."

He spent some hours in each day at the palace library; but is said never in his life to have gone farther from Florence than to Prato, whither he once accompanied Cardinal Henry Noris, librarian at the Vatican, to see a manuscript.