who has developed that manner out of long practice. For
imitation is a definite art of copying what you represent exactly after
the model of the most beautiful things of nature, which you must take
pure and free from the manner of your master or that of others, who also
reduce to a manner the things that they take from nature. And although
it may appear that the imitations made by excellent craftsmen are
natural objects, or absolutely similar, it is not possible with all the
diligence in the world to make them so similar that they shall be like
nature herself, or even, by selecting the best, to compose a body so
perfect as to make art excel nature. Now, if this is so, it follows that
only objects taken from nature can make pictures and sculptures perfect,
and that if a man studies closely only the manner of other craftsmen,
and not bodies and objects of nature, it is inevitable that he should
make works inferior both to nature and to those of the man whose manner
he adopts. Wherefore it has been seen in the case of many of our
craftsmen, who have refused to study anything save the works of their
masters, leaving nature on one side, that they have failed to gain any
real knowledge of them or to surpass their masters, but have done very
great injury to their own powers; whereas, if they had studied the
manner of their masters and the objects of nature together, they would
have produced much greater fruits in their works than they did. This is
seen in the works of the sculptor Mino da Fiesole, who, having an
intelligence capable of achieving whatsoever he wished, was so
captivated by the manner of his master Desiderio da Settignano, by
reason of the beautiful grace that he gave to the heads of women,
children, and every other kind of figure, which appeared to Mino's
judgment to be superior to nature, that he practised and studied it
alone, abandoning natural objects and thinking them useless; wherefore
he had more grace than solid grounding in his art.

It was on the hill of Fiesole, a very ancient city near Florence, that
there was born the sculptor Mino di Giovanni, who, having been
apprenticed to the craft of stone-cutting under Desiderio da Settignano,
a young man excellent in sculpture, showed so much inclination to his
master's art, that, while he was labouring at the hewing of stones, he
learnt to copy in clay the works that Desiderio had made in marble; and
this he did so well that his master, seeing that he was lik