e burin. His taste was
already for oddly formed or grotesque figures, and to counteract this
tendency Gallina had him copy the most beautiful works of the great
masters.

Possibly this conventional beginning palled upon his boyish spirit, or
he may merely have been impatient to reach Israel and behold with his
own eyes the golden city described in his friend's letters. At all
events, he shortly informed his master that he must leave him and push
on to Rome. Gallina was not lacking in sympathy, for he gave his pupil
a mule and a purse and plenty of good advice, and started him on his
journey.

Stopping at Siena, Callot gained his first notion of the style, later to
become so indisputably his own, from Duccio's mosaics, the pure
unshadowed outline of which he bore in mind when he dismissed shading
and cross-hatching from the marvelously expressive little figures that
throng his prints. He had hardly entered Rome, however, when some
merchants from the town of Nancy, his birthplace, recognized him and
bore him, protesting, back to his home.

Once more he ran away, this time taking the route to Italy through Savoy
and leading adventurous days. In Turin he was met by his elder brother
and again ignominiously returned to his parents. But his persistence was
not to go unrewarded. The third time that he undertook to seek the light
burning for him in the city of art, he went with his father's blessing,
in the suite of the ambassador dispatched to the Pope by the new duke,
Henry II.

It is said that a portrait of Charles the Bold, engraved by Jacques from
a painting, was what finally turned the scale in favor of his studying
seriously with the purpose of making art his profession. He had gained
smatterings of knowledge, so far as the use of his tools went, from
Dumange Crocq, an engraver and Master of the Mint to the Duke of
Lorraine, and from his friend Israel's father, chief painter to Charles
III. He had the habit also of sketching on the spot whatever happened to
attract his attention.

In truth he had lost but little time. At the age of seventeen he was at
work, and very hard at work, in Rome under Tempesta. Money failing him,
he became apprenticed to Philippe Thomassin, a French engraver, who
turned out large numbers of rubbishy prints upon which his apprentices
were employed at so much a day. Some three years spent in this fashion
taught Callot less art than skill in the manipulation of his
instruments. Much of his e