Short answers, pulled from the story.
Neri di Bicci was an Italian painter born in 1419 and died in 1491, active in Florence throughout his career. He was the son of Bicci di Lorenzo and the grandson of Lorenzo di Bicci, forming the third generation of a dynasty of Florentine painters.
The Ricordanze are a 189-page workshop diary Neri kept from the 10th of March, 1453 to the 24th of April, 1475. They record commissions, patron names and social status, descriptions and dimensions of works, techniques and prices, and are the most extensive such document from a fifteenth-century painter. The diary is preserved in the library of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Neri di Bicci used the old gold-ground technique associated with Giotto, leading Vasari to call him one of the last Giottoesque painters. His figures have consistent signature features: long narrow eyes half-covered by heavy eyelids, finely arched eyebrows, long thin fingers with square nails, and stiffly painted robes. Madonnas in his work always have an oval, elongated face.
Francesco Botticini studied at Neri's workshop after signing a one-year contract but left in July 1460 after nine months. He later painted the famous Assumption of the Virgin with Saints and the Angelic Hierarchies and was mentioned in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Cosimo Rosselli began his apprenticeship on the 4th of May, 1453 at the age of fourteen.
Works by Neri di Bicci are held in collections across Europe and the United States. The central panel of his 1444 Villani family triptych is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. An altarpiece commissioned in 1456 hangs in the chapel of St. James Cathedral in Seattle, one of the few works by Neri in the United States. Additional works are in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, the Uffizi, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Giorgio Vasari incorrectly described Neri as Lorenzo di Bicci's second son rather than his grandson, making Neri appear to be Bicci di Lorenzo's brother instead of his son. This caused much of Bicci's work to be misattributed to Neri. The error was corrected in 1768 by Domenico M. Manni but was repeated by Gaetano Milanesi in 1878 and by early twentieth-century scholars including Bernard Berenson.