Some pains have been taken to make clear both the experiments as to style, size, and borders in the Florentine book-illustrations of 1490-2, and the external uniformity in size and borders in the great bulk of the work of the next few years, because in the first number of the _Burlington Magazine_ and subsequently in his fine book on Florentine Drawings, Mr. Bernhard Berenson put forward with considerable confidence the theory that nine-tenths of the Florentine book-illustrations of this period were made from designs supplied by a single artist whom he identifies with a certain Bartolommeo di Giovanni. This Bartolommeo contracted in July, 1488, with the Prior of the Innocents to paint before the end of October seven predelle (Innocenti Museum, Nos. 63-70) for an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, the commission for which had been given to Domenico Ghirlandajo. Mr. Berenson believes that in addition to these predelle (the only works with which Bartolommeo is connected by any evidence other than that of style) he painted the Massacre of the Innocents, as an episode in Ghirlandajo's altarpiece at the Innocenti, that he must have been one of the more famous painter's apprentices in the years 1481-5, and subsequently helped him with altarpieces at Lucca and at the Accademia at Florence, and painted a fresco for the church of S. Frediano at Lucca and numerous fronts to the cassoni or ornamental chests, which were at this period the most decorative articles of Florentine furniture. As a minor painter Bartolommeo di Giovanni[34] is pronounced by Mr. Berenson to have been "incapable of producing on the scale of life a figure that can support inspection": in predelle and cassone-fronts he is "feeble, if vivacious, and scarcely more than pleasant," yet with no authenticated work to build on except the predelle in the Innocenti, Mr. Berenson does not hesitate to assert that "in Florence between 1490 and 1500 few apparently, if any, illustrated books were published without woodcuts for which Alunno di Domenico[34] furnished the designs," and on the strength of this assumption bestows on him the praise, amply deserved by the Florentine school as a whole, that he was "a book-illustrator, charming as few in vision and interpretation, with scarcely a rival for daintiness and refinement of arrangement, spacing and distribution of black and white." Mr. Berenson's theories oblige him to credit Bartolommeo with having copied at least from Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Piero di Cosimo, as well as from Ghirlandajo, and push the licence accorded to "connoisseurship" to its extreme limit. As I have already acknowledged elsewhere,[35] if any one man is to be credited with the whole, or nearly the whole of the Florentine book-illustrations of this decade, a minor artist used to painting predelle and cassone-fronts would be the right kind of man for the task, but on the very scanty evidence at present available I am personally more inclined to attribute