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Updated: June 12, 2025
For be sure Our Lord Jesus Christ will welcome gratefully in His holy Paradise craftsmen like myself who have portrayed His veritable likeness." And Andrea Tafi was glad at heart to be at work upon this great picture in mosaic, whereof several portions are yet visible at San Giovanni to this day.
In his callow youth, Buonamico Cristofani, Florentine, surnamed Buffalmacco by reason of his merry humour, served his apprenticeship in the workshop of Andrea Tafi, painter and worker-in-mosaic. Now the said Tafi was a very knowledgeable master.
"Among the Three Hundred Stories of Franco Saccheti," says Vasari, "we find it related to begin with, what our artist did in his youth that when Buffalmacco was studying with Andrea Tafi, his master had the habit of rising before daylight when the nights were long, compelling his scholars also to awake and proceed to their work.
He saw, to begin with, his old master Andrea Tafi, who had taught him how men win renown by practice of the arts, and whom in return he had befooled again and again, making him mistake for devils of hell a dozen wax tapers pinned on the backs of a lot of great cockroaches, and hoisting him in his bed to the joists of the ceiling, so that the poor old fellow thought he was being carried up to heaven and was in mortal terror.
Soon after he left Tafi, he took apartments adjoining those occupied by a man who was a penurious old simpleton, and compelled his wife to rise long before daylight to commence work at her spinning wheel. The old woman was often at her wheel, when Buonamico retired to bed from his revels.
But with all their faults, these grand, formal, significant groups or rather not groups, for there was as yet no attempt either at grouping or variety of action, for that would have been considered irreverent but these rows of figures, were the models of the early Italian painters and mosaic-workers in their large architectural mosaics and altar-pieces set up in the churches during the revival of Art, from the period of Cimabue and Andrea Tafi down to the latter half of the thirteenth century: all partook of this lifeless, motionless character, and were, at the same time, touched with the same solemn religious feeling.
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.
Nor did his master ever again dare to go and wake him. Andrea Tafi, of Florence, being chosen to decorate the cupola of San Giovanni with mosaics, carried out the said work in the most perfect fashion. Every figure was treated in the Greek manner, which Tafi had learned during his sojourn at Venice, where he had seen workmen busy adorning the walls of San Marco.
Buffalmacco might go far in the art of painting, if he would only apply himself more vigorously. But there, his mind is far too much set on self-indulgence; and great achievements can only be accomplished by steady labour. Now Calendrino here would beat you all, with his industry if he were not a born fool." In such fashion Andrea Tafi improved the occasion with a proper severity.
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