ABSTRACT
There have always been painters and sculptors who, by their most unorthodox manner of living, baffled their contemporaries. The Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, and after him, the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio managed, through their brawls with fellow citizens and their skirmishes with the authorities, to shock even a society far more accustomed to displays of ferocity and brutality than ours. But these two, and similar high-spirited characters, were not bohemians in the sense that the term is now used. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, bohemians are socially unconventional persons of free and easy habits, manners, and sometimes morals, especially artists; the American College Dictionary defines them as persons with artistic or intellectual tendencies who live and act with disregard for conventional rules of behavior; Webster s Collegiate Dictionary wisely brings out the point that they adopt a mode of life in protest against, or indifference to, the common conventions of society, especially in social relations. (italics mine).
