ed and still increasing attention which the world is paying to
all the details and all the branches of cinque-cento art--to good
purpose, for it is due to it that we have emerged or are emerging from
the eighteenth-century depths of ugliness in all our surroundings--has
induced the useful Dryasdusts, whose nature and function it is to burrow
in corporation and conventual muniment-rooms and the like promising
covers, to search out with a very considerable degree of success a mass
of facts, not only as to the real authorship of the work in question,
but curiously illustrative of the status these artists held and the
manner in which they lived and worked. Among the principal of these
archive-hunters is the learned Professor Adam Rossi, the corporation
librarian at Perugia, and it is mainly to his researches that the facts
I am about to lay before the reader are due.

One of the finest specimens of cinque-cento wood-work extant in
Italy--perhaps I might safely say the finest--is the choir of the
monastic church of St. Peter at Perugia. The monks of St. Peter were
Benedictines of Monte Cassino, and, like most of the families of that
order, they were very wealthy and were liberal patrons of art. On the
9th of April, 1525, having determined to refit the choir of their church
in a magnificent manner, they came to an agreement with a
master-carpenter of Perugia for the execution of the work, and a
detailed contract was signed by the parties. (I have called this
cinque-cento work, and it will be observed that it was executed in the
sixteenth century. It may be necessary, therefore, to explain to those
who are unacquainted with the Italian mode of speaking in this respect
that the Italians always speak of what we should call the fourteenth
century as the "trecento," what we should call the fifteenth, as the
"quattrecento," and so on. The period at which art in all its branches
culminated in Italy was, in our language, the sixteenth century.)

Maestro Bernardino di Luca, the artist with whom the convent contracted
for the fitting of the choir, is styled in the instrument _legnaiuolo_
(a "carpenter"). And no doubt Maestro Bernardino--or "Bino," for short,
as he is called in the instrument when once at the beginning he has been
named formally at full length--practiced all the more ordinary business
of his trade. But there must have been carpenters _and_ carpenters, as
to the present day there are painters _and_ painters, the same wor