Buffalmacco and Bruno persuade him to believe that he is pregnant because his digestion has been affected by overeating, — that he never possessed a pig which they had stolen. It is amusing to read the narrative of Buffal- macco’s success in forcing Andrea Tafi to rise late instead of early; his rivalry with the monkey of Guido, bishop of Arezzo, 1 who repainted in the evening the frescos which had been completed during the day; — the trick which he played on the very same bishop, a fierce and haughty Ghibelline, by painting for him, instead of an eagle humbling the Florentine lion, a lion devouring the Imperial eagle; and the revenge he took on the impatient people of Perugia by painting their patron Saint Ercolano with a diadem of fishes. Wonderful was the cunning with which he deceived the nuns of Faenza into the belief that he was labouring assiduously at the frescos of their church, by substituting a lay figure for himself during a fortnight spent in idleness; and then persuaded them that the sacramental wine was the best for mixing colours. Equally jocose is the trick perpetrated on a peasant who, having ordered a S. Christopher of twelve braccie to be painted in a chapel that had only nine braccie in height, was obliged to content himself with a figure on the floor whose legs passed out of the entrance; — that too in which the painter took revenge for non payment of the price of a Madonna by secretly painting a bear’s cub in the arms of the Virgin. No wonder that such a man should die in an hospital; or that the fame of his adventures should have survived his pictures. It may be doubted, indeed, whether even Vasari, who gives a vast catalogue of his works, did not group together under his name a mass of inferior productions by various hands, being anxious to illustrate the life of so jolly an artist with something more than the stories of Sacchetti and Boccaccio. Yet Ghiberti affirms that Bonamico, or Buffalmacco, was an excellent master; that his colour Guido, bishop of Arezzo, died in 1327.