This work is a precious monument of the art of painting in the fourteenth century, and as such enters into the plan of our Journal. Its author was a painter called Cennino, son of Drea Cennini, born about 1360 at Colle of Valdelsa, a small town of Tuscany. In his youth he was for twelve years a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, whose father Taddeo had been a disciple of the celebrated Giotto, the restorer of painting in Europe. We know from Vasari that "in conjunction with his master he painted many works in Florence," and moreover that "he painted with his own hand under the loggia of Bonifazio's Hospital a picture of the Virgin with Saints, so well coloured that it was still in good preservation at the time he wrote" (1550). This painting was subsequently removed from the wall, and fixed upon canvass by order of the Grand Duke Leopold, and is now to be seen in the Florentine Gallery. He does not seem however to have made a fortune by his talents; while Angelo Gaddi his master died leaving to his sons immense riches, his unlucky disciple at the great age of eighty years, or thereabouts, was confined for debt in the prisons of the Stinche, the King's Bench of Florence, a melancholy circumstance mentioned by himself in the colophon of his book, which he wrote in 1437, when in confinement. This is all that we learn of this painter and writer from Vasari, Baldinucci and Tambroni, and which is to be collected from the work we are speaking of. To this we may add, that we have reason to believe that he was the grandfather of that famous orefice Bernardo Cennini, who introduced the art of printing into Florence.
His work is a practical and mechanical treatise of the different modes of painting used in his time, and which had descended directly to him from Giotto through Taddeo Gaddi and Angelo his son. It is divided into six parts: the first relates to drawing: the second treats of colours and their preparation: the third, of painting in fresco: the fourth comprises the subject of painting in oil: the fifth, after a brief but curious estimate of the time requisite for learning to paint, gives directions for making sizes and glues of various kinds: the sixth and last treats of preparing the grounds for painting upon, of gilding on pictures, of painting pictures in distemper, of draperies, of mordants, of varnishing, of miniature-painting, of taking casts from the life, &c. All these subjects are treated by Cennino in such an unstudied style, with so much order, and such a minute particularity, that the most ignorant person in the art of
