Many years ago, when Cennini’s Craftsman’s Handbook,  Il Libro dell’Arte,  first landed in my hot little hands, I read it numerous times with utter fascination. This was exactly the type of art I wanted to learn, and I wondered if his instruction would be relevant 600 years later. The internet wasn’t quite a thing the time, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But, my curiosity got the better of me and I started to dabble.

This was one of my earliest experiments, which was approached quite naively. I didn’t research any reference pieces to study what a 15th Century portrait in oils might have looked like, and had no real concern for accuracy in costumes. I just whipped out a commercially made miniature canvas and some random modern oil paints so I could try to follow Cennini’s step-by-step section for painting a “youthful face”. So while there are so many things wrong with this piece, I do cherish it because on some level, it worked and I knew that Cennini and his little book had much more to teach me.