selves the life and
surroundings of the craftsman of a time when the line which is
now-a-days supposed to divide the artist from the artisan did not exist
or was ignored. We have followed the patient investigations which
Leonardo, while his brain was teeming with forms of beauty and new
creations, did not disdain to expend on matters which we in these days
deem the province of the colorman. We have been delighted by Cellini's
simple accounts of his methods of subjecting matter to the conceptions
of his brain, uncaring and unconscious whether such methods involved
processes that belonged to high art or low art, fine art or not
fine--caring only for the beauty that his handiwork was to create. The
modern "studio" is a phrase that claims greater affinity with strictly
intellectual processes, but in the days and generations when immortal
works were being produced in every little town throughout the central
part of Italy, the men who created them were content to call the place
in which they worked a _bottega_--"a shop." And the blacksmith who
wrought with sturdy arm and hammer the ironwork that museums now contend
against each other for the possession of, and pay for as if it were
gold--the wood-carver who produced by his free fancy the gems which our
best artists are content to servilely copy--the sculptor who would sign
works that now make the cities that possess them famous--the _lapicido_
("stone-cutter"), like that Agostino Fiorentino whose inimitable chisel
produced the front of the oratorio of Saint Bernardino in this same
Perugia--the goldsmith, the delicate fancy of whose handiwork puts to
shame the coarser and heavier work of our time--the painter for whose
presence at their courts princes were bidding against each other,--all
these alike lived and labored in a _bottega_, and would have scorned the
notion of calling themselves or imagining themselves other than
craftsmen.

Well, we sought and easily found an introduction to the artist who had
produced the new window in the cathedral. His name is Signor Francesco
Moretti. A common friend accompanied us to his workshop-studio. It is
situated in a part of a suppressed convent, or some such place, which
has come into the hands of the municipality, and a vast chamber in which
has been placed at the disposition of the artist. The _locale_ itself
has an Old-World look about it. A huge stair, up which you might almost
drive a coach and four, ascends from a cloister running