The painter himself was just a fine craftsman. He kept a shop and called it such—a _bottega_. He worked only to order. There were no exhibitions, no museums, no academies, no art schools, no prizes, no dealers. The painters modestly joined the guild of the druggists (_speziali_), who were their color makers, quite as the up-to-date newspaper reporter affiliates himself with the typographical union. When a rich man wanted a picture, he simply went to a painter’s shop and ordered it, laying down as a matter of course the subject and everything about the treatment that interested him. If the work was of importance, a contract and specifications were drawn up. The kind of colors, pay by the job or by the day, the amount to be painted by the contracting artist himself, the time of completion, with or without penalty—all this was precisely nominated in the bond. Naturally the painter used his shop-assistants and apprentices as much as possible. Often he did little himself except heads and principal figures. But he made the designs and carefully supervised their execution on panel or wall. A Florentine painter’s _bottega_ then had none of the preciousness of a modern painter’s studio. It was rather like a decorator’s shop of today, the master being merely the business head and guiding artistic taste. When we speak of a fresco by Giotto, we do not mean that Giotto painted much of it, any more than a La Farge window implies that our great American master of stained-glass design himself cut and set the glass. The painter of Florence had to be a jack-of-all-trades, a color grinder, a cabinet maker, and a wood carver; a gilder; to be capable of copying any design and of inventing fine decorative features himself. He must be equally competent in the delicate methods of tempera painting as in the resolute procedures of fresco.