Vasari briefly mentions Ghetti, whom he calls "Baccio Gotti" in the Lives, describing him as a pupil of Ghirlandaio and stating that he worked in France at the court of King Francois I.
The payments records reveal that, together with Matteo dal Nassaro, Ghetti designed the rich set of hangings, with subjects drawn from Virgil's Bucolics, that were produced to decorate a so-called Chambre verte in 1521.
Though, as we have seen, he worked for François I before 1515, “Bartholomeus Zenobii Ghetti” was present at a meeting of the Florentine Compagnia di San Jacopo, called “La Sgalla” on 1 January 1516 (modern style).
In the same year the Compagnia di San Giovanni of Fucecchio decided to commission an altarpiece for their oratory, which Ghetti would subsequently execute (his sole surviving large-scale work).
The courtly and elegant ladies depicted in the miniatures, with their oval faces, high foreheads, and elaborate hairstyles bear a distinct affinity to the female figures in Ghetti's panel paintings.
This work was evidently admired by early viewers, since a partial copy of the picture made in 1641 by Andrea di Giovanni Battista Ferrari exists at the nearby parish church of San Bartolomeo at Gavena.
In all likelihood they commissioned Ghetti's altar-piece shortly after the deliberation was made in the summer of 1525, and the San Pietro a Selva lunette was probably painted not too long before the laudum of September 1527, the similarities between the two pictures are easy to comprehend.
A passage from the 1541 statutes of the Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista at Fucecchio reveals that the altar of their oratory, adjacent to the Collegiata but deconsecrated in the late eighteenth century, had a dual dedication to the Virgin and St. John the Baptist.
Both panels have been cut down drastically from their original dimensions, and the lunette — apparently chopped down to an uncomfortable and much smaller arched format at an unknown date — was subsequently reintegrated with new spandrels in order to fill it out as a rectangle.
An inventory of artworks transferred to the Collegiata of Fucecchio by the Opera di San Salvatore after the latter's suppression by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo (2 June 1790) describes the altarpiece in essentially its present configuration, with the Baptism of Christ above the sacra conversazione.
The composition of Ghetti's altarpiece at Fucecchio — featuring the Virgin on an elevated throne and covered by a canopy, set against a colonnaded apse and flanked by standing saints — reflects Raphael's unfinished Madonna del Baldacchino, a work that cast a long shadow in early-Cinquecento Florentine painting.
John the Baptist, Nicholas of Bari, Anthony Abbot and Peter at Montemurlo — curiously, the same figure that his fellow Florentine Giovanni Larciani had copied in his own Fucecchio altarpiece only a few years earlier.
Ghetti's lost Madonna and Child, which measures 54 x 50 cm., forms part of the historic collection of marchese Federico Manfredini (1743–1829), the wealthy and influential counselor of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.
Under Pietro Leopoldo's son and successor Ferdinando III, Manfredini was appointed Maggiordomo Maggiore, and negotiating in this guise with Napoleon in 1797 he briefly preserved the independence of the Grand Duchy.
But he retired from public life, officially on account of a riding accident, in 1805, making his home at first in Padua and subsequently at his villa at Campo Verardo, in the Venetian terraferma, where he died in 1829.
It was accepted by Edwards in his 1809 inventory, by the Venetian police inspector and art dilettante Antonio Neu Mayr (or Neumayr) in his 1811 treatise on Italian painting and his 1836 Mazzolino pittorico, and by Giannantonio Moschini in his 1842 catalogue.