498 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. Ciiap. XXI. CHAPTER XXI. BENOZZO GOZZOLI AND IIIS ASSISTANTS. An artist versatile in the appropriation and absorption of pictorial features characteristic of divers masters and periods may be powerful as a machine, prolific by nature; he is seldom great, and never original. Such an artist may excite surprise, by the readiness with which he assumes and forsakes a manner, by the rapidity of his execution and the consequent fecundity which it engenders; he cannot claim a high place in the history of art; and thus, whilst we acknowledge in Domenico Ghirlandaio the talents which form an epoch, we concede to Benozzo Gozzoli little more than industry and an aptitude for collecting and superficially applying, with the aid of a somewhat extrava gant fancy, the gains acquired by the united energy of the painters of the fifteenth century. The principal interest which might attach in our eyes to the works of Benozzo is due not so much to their intrinsic value, as to their influence on a certain section of Umbrian painters; and it is cu rious to remark that whilst the example of Giotto left little or no trace in Assisi and its neighbourhood, that of a second rate Florentine of a later time produced an impress equally strong and lasting, proving a greater facility in painters of these parts to assimilate a showy and coarse style than a pure and great one. Gozzoli’s real name is Benozzo di Lese di Sandro. He was born at Florence in 1424, 1 — followed, as we have seen, Fra Giovanni to Rome, and acted as his assistant at Or- 1 So according to his father’s income paper of 1470, in 1420 accord ing to his own of 1480.