Although construction of new baptismal buildings was rare in Europe after late antiquity, more than 80 baptisteries were built in the Italic world from 1000 to 1600. They include some of the Italy’s most celebrated monuments, such as the spectacular baptisteries of Florence, Parma, and Pisa. But baptistery building did not end with the fourteenth century, despite its disappearance from mainstream art historical discourse. In the Renaissance (as in the Middle Ages), new baptisteries were sometimes built upon the establishment of a new diocese, as in Pienza, or when a preexisting church was raised in status to a cathedral, archipresbyterate, or pieve. Their patrons recognized that distinct baptismal structures were seen as an essential part of the complex of ecclesiastical buildings that gave tangible form to the bishop, archpriest, or pievano’s privileges and prerogatives. And in the Renaissance (as in the Middle Ages), new baptisteries sometimes were built when ecclesiastical, political, or economic control of an existing see changed hands or needed to be reasserted in the face of external pressures, as in Venice. Far from losing their cultural importance, both long-established and newly built baptisteries remained highly charged signifiers of spiritual and secular authority in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This is one reason why, as late as 1577, Counter-Reformation leader Archbishop Carlo Borromeo recommended the construction of freestanding baptisteries instead of baptismal chapels tucked inside cathedrals in his noted Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae.