s more--of very humble origin had shown a
remarkable talent for modeling busts in terra-cotta. Having formed his
taste for himself, not by means of any academical teaching, but by
imbuing his mind with the examples of mediaeval art which meet the eye on
all sides in his native city, his works assumed quite naturally the
manner and style of the artists who (in more or less direct line) were
his ancestors. One day it happened to him to see a man--he was a common
workman in the tobacco manufactory--whose head struck him as specially
marked by the old Florentine mediaeval type and as a remarkably good
subject for a characteristic bust. From this man he made a terra-cotta
bust which few could have pronounced to be other than a _cinque-cento_
work, and a very fine one. Bastianini, then quite unknown and much in
need of wherewithal to live, sold this bust as the work of his hands to
a speculative dealer for, if I remember rightly, five hundred francs.
The man who bought it carried it to a dealer in antiquities--a very
well-known man in Florence whose name I could give were it of any
interest to do so--and proposed to sell it to him for a large sum.
Eventually, a bargain was struck on this basis: The dealer, with perfect
knowledge of the origin and authorship of the work, was to pay one
thousand francs for the bust, and to pay the seller another thousand if
and whenever he, the dealer, should succeed in reselling it for more
than a certain price named. Thereupon, in accordance with the usual
practice in such cases, the bust disappeared from sight. It was stored
in the secret repositories of the _antiquario_ till the circumstances
attending its creation should be a little forgotten, and dust and dirt
should have corrected the brand-new rawness of its surface, ready to be
produced with much mystery as a recent _trouvaille_ when a likely
purchaser should loom over the Apennine which encircles "gentile
Firenze." In due time, one of the largest and brightest of those comets
whose return is so accurately calculated and eagerly expected by the
Florentine dealers in ancient art made his appearance in the Tuscan
sky--no less than a buyer for the Louvre. Those were the halcyon days of
the Empire, and money was plenty. Poor Bastianini's bust was brought out
with all due mystery, duly admired by the infallible French connoisseur,
and eventually purchased by him for the imperial collection for, I
think, five thousand francs--at all events, fo