n sheer despair that his father,
Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the
nickname of Botticello--'the little tun'--perhaps on account of his
rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy
came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the
boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. Both
Botticelli and Gozzoli, like many first-rate artists of that time, were
quiet, hard-working men, devoted to their art, and not remarkable for
anything else. The consequence is that little is known about their
lives. It is natural that we should know most about the men who were
most different from their companions, such as Michelangelo on the one
hand, and Benvenuto Cellini on the other, or Beato Angelico and Lippo
Lippi, or the clever Buffalmacco--whose practical jokes were told by
Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and have even brought him into modern
literature--and Lionardo da Vinci. Then, as now, there were two types
of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars.
Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato
Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and
Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians. As for the latter, he seems scarcely
ever to have painted a picture without playing off a practical jest upon
his employer, and he began his career by terrifying his master, who
insisted upon waking him to work before dawn. He fastened tiny wax
tapers upon the backs of thirty black beetles, and as soon as he heard
the old man stirring and groping in the dark, he lighted the tapers
quickly, and drove the beetles into the room, through a crack under the
door, and they ran wildly hither and thither on the pavement. The master
took them for demons come to carry off his soul; he almost lost his
senses in a fit, and he used half the holy water in Florence to exorcise
the house. But ever afterwards he was too much frightened to get up
before daylight, and Buffalmacco slept out the long night in peace.

Andrea Mantegna, the great painter and engraver, who made the final step
in the development of pictorial art in Italy, was a shepherd's son, like
Giotto, born about one hundred years after Giotto's death. Similar
conditions and a similar bent of genius produced different results in
different centuries. Between Giotto and Mantegna the times had changed;
men lived differently, thought differently and saw diffe