I took the book to the front desk and asked how much it was, $89, I was told. 'But there's a stain right here, can I please have a discount?' ... of course, Mike said (a man wearing a name tag)... I can give it to you for 50% off, but it's final sale. PERFECT. $44 for the most beautiful book iv'e ever seen.
Anyways I rushed home, curled on my couch, and just started reading... this is what i found in the first few pages:
Cennini sets out guidelines for artistic training, developing what might be described as a somewhat simplistic description of individual style when he makes recommendations to apprentices on how to learn drawing from the example of skilled masters:
"Having now practiced drawing for a while as I have taught you above, that is, on a little panels, take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which can be done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and another tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of wither one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man's way today, and in the other's tomorrow, and so you will get neither of them right. If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you to not get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns."
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