which the seraphim
burn, better than in any other way, and lifts up our spirit and plunges
our mind into the depths beyond the stars, to imagine the empirean that
there exists. What shall I say of how it brings before us the worthies who
passed away so long ago, and whose bones even are not now upon this earth,
to enable us to imitate them in their bright deeds? Or how it shows us
their councils and battles by examples and delightful histories? Their
great deeds, their piety and their manners? To captains it shows the
manoeuvres of the old armies, the cohorts and their disposition, their
discipline and their military order. It animates and creates daring, by
emulation and an honest envy of the famous ones, as Scipio the African
confessed.

"It leaves a memorial of the present times for those who come after.
Painting shows us the garb of the pilgrim or of antiquity, the variety of
foreign peoples and nations, buildings, animals, and monsters, which in
writing it would be prolix to hear about, and even then it would be but
badly understood. And not only these things does this noble art, but it
places before our eyes the image of any great man who should be seen and
known because of his deeds, and likewise the beauty of a woman who is
separated from us by many leagues, a thing on which Pliny reflects much.
To one who dies it gives many years of life, his own face remaining behind
painted, and his wife is consoled, seeing daily before her the image of
her deceased husband, and the sons who were left little children rejoice
when men to know the presence and the aspect of their dear father, and
fear to shame him."

As the Marchioness, almost weeping, made a pause here, M. Lactancio, in
order to draw her out of her sorrowful imagination and memories, said:

"Besides all these things, which are great, what is there that more
ennobles or makes other things more beautiful than painting, whether on
arms, in temples, in palaces, or fortresses, or anywhere else where beauty
and order may have a place? And so great minds assert that there is
nothing a man can find to fight against his mortality or against the
flight of time but painting only. Nor did Pithagoras depart from this view
when he said that only in three things were men similar to the immortal
God: in science, in painting, and in music."

Here Master Michael said:

"I am sure that if in your Portugal, M. Francisco, they were to see the
beauty of the painting that is in