We have all heard much of the circumstances and conditions, so different from those of our day, under which the old Italian art-workers of the palmy days of art lived and worked. We have read Vasari's naive gossiping, and have endeavored to picture to ourselves 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.