earnest study began. Piero di Cosimo, odd and misanthropic as he was,
had yet a true appreciation of talent, and showed an earnest interest
in his pupil, giving him--with plenty of queer treatment--a thorough
training. "He was not allowed to make a line which was not perfect"
[Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap. xvii. p. 40.]
while in Piero's school. But excellent as his art teaching may have
been, the boy's morale could not have been raised more here than under
the rough but good-natured Barile. We have seen Piero di Cosimo in his
youth, the serious, absent young man, who never joked with his juniors
in Cosimo Roselli's shop; we see him now, with his youthful oddities
hardened into eccentricities, and his reserve deepened to misanthropy.
No woman's hand softened and refined his house, no cleansing broom was
allowed within his door, and no gardener's hand cleared the weeds or
pruned the vines in his garden. He so believed in nature unassisted
that he took his meals without the intervention of a cook. When the
fire was lighted to boil his size or glue he would cook fifty or sixty
eggs and set them apart in a basket, to which he had recourse when the
pangs of hunger compelled him. All this was morally very bad for a boy
so young. And then woe betide the poor little fellow if he whistled,
sneezed, or made any other noise! his nervous master would be out of
temper for a day afterwards. On wet days Piero was merrier, for he
would watch the drops splashing into the pools, and laugh as if they
were fairies. Sometimes he would take Andrea for a walk, and all at
once stop and gaze at a heap of rubbish, or mark of damp on a lichened
wall, picturing all kinds of monsters and weird scenes in its
discolourations.

No doubt he was literally carrying out Leonardo da Vinci's advice,
headed, in his treatise, "A new Art of Invention." "Look at some old
wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some old streaked