The other branches of mediæval and Renaissance art found a busy centre also in Milan. The decorative crafts of the goldsmith, wood-carver, of the intarsia worker and embroiderer, flourished here early. In the fourteenth century the fame of the Milanese armourers was shared by the hands which engraved the swords and shields and cuirasses forged in the clanging quarter of the Spadari. The unparalleled wealth and luxury of the Visconti and of their nobles called for the finest skill of the embroiderer and goldsmith to adorn their apparel and harness, and lavished ornamentation on their palaces, their pageants, their feasts, which shone with gold and glowed with costly and beautiful colour. In the following century all these crafts were still more encouraged by the Sforza. Matteo da Civate was a goldsmith of repute, and the Mantegazza and others of the sculptors pursued this delicate craft also with great success. The fame of the Milanese goldsmiths was finally crowned by Ambrogio Foppa, known as Caradosso, whose figures chiselled in gold were of such admirable workmanship that Cellini himself praised and envied him as one of the greatest masters in this art that he had ever known. The native workers were, however, but a few of those employed at the Sforza Court, which in the days of Lodovico and Beatrice was a very museum of artistic work of every kind, contributed by the finest talent of Italy, Germany, Flanders and Spain. Nor was the art of painting less cherished in Milan. The Visconti, for the adornment of their great palace at Pavia, the Sforza for the splendid halls of the Castle of Milan, and of their hundred villas and palaces of pleasure, engaged an army of painters. But until the later half of the fifteenth century not one name occurs there of any significance in the history of painting. Giovanni da Milano, mentioned by Vasari as a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, and an excellent painter, shows in his surviving works the conventional style of the later Giottesque school, varied by something of that heaviness and darkness of colour which we see afterwards in the Milanese Quattrocentists. From Giovanni onwards the few artists that we hear of, and the many that certainly worked in Milan, have left little trace behind them, and that little does not differ from the rude and homely style common in North Italy before the development of the Paduan school. Early in the fifteenth century the influence of Pisanello, who worked in the Visconti Court, and of the artistic ideals which he represents, made itself felt in Milan, and painters like Michelino da Besozzo and the Zavatarii peopled the walls of the ducal and aristocratic palaces of the Milanese state with such decorative, but strangely proportioned figures as are still to be seen in a chamber of the Palazzo Borromeo. Other and stronger influences, however, must have been working in the Milanese at this time, and under the spur of Florentine and Paduan example, and that of