clever man. He knew the proportions to be given to the different parts
of the human body and the material for mixing the best cement.

Fearing the Greek might carry his knowledge and address to some other
painter of the city, Andrea Tafi never left his side day or night Every
morning he took him with him to San Giovanni, and brought him home
every evening to his own house, facing San Michele, and made him sleep
there with his two apprentices, Bruno and Buffalmacco, in a room
separated merely by a partition from his own bed-chamber. And as this
partition left half a foot between the top and the beams of the ceiling,
whatever was said in one room could easily be overheard in the other.

Now Tafi was a man of decent manners and pious. He was not like some
painters who, on leaving the Churches where they have been depicting God
creating the world and the infant Jesus in his holy mother's arms, go
straight to houses of ill fame to play dice and drink, play the pipes
and cuddle the girls. He had never wished for better than his good wife,
albeit she was by no means made and moulded by the Creator to afford any
great delight to men; for she was a very dry and a very chilling
personage. Then, after God had removed her from this world to a better,
in his loving mercy, Andrea took no other woman to his bosom either by
marriage or otherwise. On the contrary he was strictly continent, as
became his years, sparing himself both expense and vexation, and
pleasing God to boot, who recompenses in the next world the privations
men endure in this. Andrea Tafi was chaste, sober and well-advised.

He said his prayers with unfailing regularity, and being got to bed, he
never fell asleep without first invoking the Blessed Virgin in these
words: