CHAPTER 8
Bernardino went out in front of his store with a copy of his last work in his hand. He wanted to see it in daylight, to see how the colour illustrations had come. With that illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy he had surpassed not only his predecessor Federico Conti, but also himself. Bernardino had taken up the Florentine edition of the poem of the great poet Dante Alighieri. He knew that in the year of the Lord 1481, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco De’ Medici had commissioned Sandro Botticelli to create one hundred plates illustrating scenes from the poem. Of these one hundred, Botticelli had made only nineteen, which had been engraved on plates, in order to be printed, by the engraver Baccio Baldini. Since the work was not completed by Sandro Botticelli, the Florentine edition, whi
