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The Italian Renaissance Reader That Painting Surpasses all Human Works by the Subtle Consideration Belonging to It The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and fully appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen. If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, you would have been able to write about them poorly. And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness, and it would be less tedious to understand. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect, to be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his stories, they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings, for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions, and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms in order to represent them. now tell me which is closer to man himself: the name of man or the image of man. The name of a man may differ from country to country, but a man's form is never changed except by death. [ next section ] That Sculpture is Less Intellectual than Painting and Lacks Many Characteristics of Nature Since I myself have practiced the art of sculpture no less than that of painting, doing both of them to the same degree, it seems to me that I, without invidiousness, can give my opinion as to which of the two is most worthy, difficult, and perfect. To begin with, sculpture requires a certain light (that is, from above), while a picture carried with it throughout its own light and shade. Thus sculpture owes its importance to light and shade, and the sculptor is assisted in this by nature, by the relief which is inherent in it, while the painter whose art expresses the accidental aspects of nature places his effects in the spots where nature would reasonably have put them. The sculptor cannot change his work by means of the various natural colors that objects contain, but painting is not defective in any particular. The perspective used by the sculptors never appears to be true; that of the painter can appear to be a hundred miles beyond the picture itself. Their sculpted works have no aerial perspective whatever; they cannot represent luminous bodies, no reflected lights, nor lustrous bodies - as mirrors and similar polished surfaces - nor mists, nor dark skies, nor an infinite number of things which I need not mention for fear of becoming tedious. As regards the capability to resist time, though they do have this resistance, a picture painted on thick copper covered with white enamel on which it is painted enamel colors and then put back into the fire and baked will last forever compared to sculpture. It may be said that if a mistake is made it is not easy to correct it, but it is a poor argument to try to prove that a piece of work is nobler because oversights are irremediable; I would say rather that it is more difficult to improve the mind of the master who makes such mistakes than to fix the work he has ruined. We're reading The Italian Renaissance Reader as part of my High Renaissance Literature, Art, Architecture and History class. This great book has excerpts from famous works of that time, including Bocaccio's Decameron, Machiavelli's The Prince and like the excepts below, Leonardo's the Notebooks.

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