a painter, he was an amateur, because if it were thought that he made his living from painting it would significantly lower his social status. It is for this reason that few people in the early Renaissance would see painting as a method of social advancement or to demonstrate intellectual ability. This did not however stop many painters having aspirations for higher social and intellectual status, despite their background and education rarely supporting this aspiration.
             The majority of painters were brought up in the artisan class, this meant that painters seldom went to Grammar school or University. Most painters' education was limited to the basic training provided by the abacus school. There are however exceptions to this trend, perhaps most notably Alberti. He attended Grammar school and graduated in law from University. Similarly Leonardo da Vinci was gifted in mathematics, as Vasari tells us, he "began to learn arithmetic and after a few months he had made such progress that he used to baffle his master with questions and problems that he raised."# Even Leonardo did not have knowledge of Latin. The study of Latin was not part of the abacus school curriculum. When Pietro Lorenzetti needed a text of the life of St Savinus for his alter piece in Siena Cathedral; he paid a grammar school teacher to translate the text from Latin for him. Proficiency in Latin was a prerequisite to be considered a literate man in higher social circles. The lack of a humanist education on the part of the artist perpetuated the view of painting as a craft. Leonardo admitted in the last decade of the fifteenth century that he was not a 'man of letters' he was saying he did not have a command of Latin "I do not have literary learning but my concerns are better handled through experience rather than bookishness."# Despite this statement it is obvious from an analysis of the books in his library that he attempted to lear...