Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/196

162 ally a waistcoat-maker, named Lese di Sandro. He was born in 1420, and like many of his contemporaries, learnt the trade of both painter and goldsmith in his boyhood. From 1444 to 1447, he worked with Lorenzo Ghiberti on the second of his Baptistery gates, and acquired from him that taste for landscape and architecture, and love of pleasant details and accessories, which marked his future work. Sir Joshua Reynolds' well-known remark, that buildings and landscape occupied so large a place in Ghiberti's bas-reliefs that his figures were only secondary objects, might be applied with equal truth to many of Benozzo's frescoes. In 1447, Fra Angelico, under whom Benozzo may have studied as a boy, took the young artist with him to Rome, and employed him both in the Vatican Chapel and at Orvieto. Here Benozzo's hand can be clearly traced in the pyramidal groups of Saints and Prophets on the roof of San Brizio's Chapel, and when Fra Angelico returned to Florence, his assistant offered to complete the work which he had left unfinished. But the Directors of the Cathedral Works declined his proposal, and the decoration of the chapel walls was only carried out fifty years later by Luca Signorelli. The frescoes of the Cesarini Chapel in Ara Cœli, which Benozzo next undertook, have all perished, excepting one figure, which is exactly imitated from Angelico, and represents St. Anthony of Padua with a flame in one hand and a book in the other.

In 1450, Benozzo was invited to Montefalco, one of the hill-set cities of Umbria, on the heights above the valley of the Clitumnus, and painted the altarpiece of the Assumption, now in the Lateran, as