It must not be thought that this education was a mean one for so great an artist.  Painting and sculpture in Italy were regarded as trades, and the artist had his bottega just as much as the cobbler or the blacksmith.[348] I have already had occasion to point out that an apprenticeship to goldsmith’s work was considered at Florence an almost indispensable commencement of advanced art-study.[349] Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghiberti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all underwent this training before they applied themselves to architecture, painting, and sculpture.  As the goldsmith’s craft was understood in Florence, it exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as well as design.  It forced the student to familiarise himself with the materials, instruments, and technical processes of art; so that, later on in life, he was not tempted to leave the execution of his work to journeymen and hirelings.[350] No labour seemed too minute, no metal was too mean, for the exercise of the master-workman’s skill; nor did he run the risk of becoming one of those half-amateurs in whom accomplishment falls short of first conception.  Art ennobled for him all that he was called to do.  Whether cardinals required him to fashion silver vases for their banquet-tables; or ladies wished the setting of their jewels altered; or a pope wanted the enamelled binding of a book of prayers; or men-at-arms sent swordblades to be damascened with acanthus foliage; or kings desired fountains and statues for their palace courts; or poets begged to have their portraits cast in bronze; or generals needed medals to commemorate their victories, or dukes new coins for their mint; or bishops ordered reliquaries for the altars of their patron saints; or merchants sought for seals and signet rings engraved with their device; or men of fashion asked for medallions of Leda and Adonis to fasten in their caps—­all these commissions could be undertaken by a workman like Cellini.  He was prepared for all alike by his apprenticeship to orfevria; and to all he gave the same amount of conscientious toil.  The consequence was that, at the time of the Renaissance, furniture, plate, jewels, and articles of personal adornment were objects of true art.  The mind of the craftsman was exercised afresh in every piece of work.  Pretty things were not bought, machine-made, by the gross in a warehouse; nor was it customary, as now it is, to see the same design repeated with mechanical regularity in every house.

In 1518 Benvenuto returned to Florence and began to study the cartoons of Michael Angelo.  He must have already acquired considerable reputation as a workman, for about this time Torrigiani invited him to go to England in his company and enter the service of Henry VIII.  The Renaissance was now beginning to penetrate the nations of the North, and Henry and Francis vied with each other in trying to attract foreign artists to their capitals.  It does not,