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CHAPTER XII. ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO AND DOMENICO VENIZIANO. Cptemporary with Uccelli, and celebrated, not less for his talent, than for a certain legendary violence of temper, lived Andrea del Castagno, an artist, of considerable power, clothed in a hard and rough bark of rustic coarseness, but a good fellow, as his pet name of Andreino 1 indicates, and one to whom the study of drawing and of nature owed some improvement in the fifteenth century. Born in 1390, a few years before Uccelli, and called del Castagno, either because the poor hamlet of that name in the Muggello witnessed his entry into the world, or because he lived there in childhood, his father Bartolom meo di Simone was a labourer and small proprietor of S. Andrea a Linari in the country of Florence. 2 An orphan in early years, 3 he tended the flock of a cousin by Castagno, and would probably have spent his days in rustic labours, but that he stumbled by chance upon an itinerant painter at work in a tabernacle, and, fired by the wish to study the artistic profession, he began scratching rude figures on walls and stones. He thus attracted the attention of Bernardetto de’ Medici, who took him to Florence, where 1 He is called Andrein by Gio. Santi in his Elogio (Pungileoni Elog. Stor. ub. sup. p. 73), An dreino by Albertini, Memoriale ub. sup. p. 13, and Andreino degl’ Impiccati by Filarete in the dedi cation to his MS. Trattato d’Ar- cliitettura. (See also Gaetano Milanesi in Gio male Stor. degliArchiviToscani an. VI. 1862. p. 7.) 2 Ibid. p. 2. The date of An drea’s birth, the place and his father’s name are given by the painter in his first return to the income tax at Florence in 1430. 3 In his return he cannot give
