ions of sieges and assaults than
painting? Do you not know that when Pope Clement and the Spaniards
besieged Florence, it was only by the work and virtue of the painter M.
Angelo that the besieged were defended a good while, not to say, the city
released, and the captains and soldiers outside were for a good while
astonished and oppressed and killed through the defences and strongholds
which I made on the tower, lining them in one night on the outside with
bags of wool and other materials, emptying them of earth and filling them
with fine powder, with which I burnt a little the blood of the
Castillians, whom I sent through the air torn in pieces? So that I
consider great painting as not only profitable in war, but exceedingly
necessary; for the engines and instruments of war and for catapults, rams,
mantlets, testudines, and iron-shod towers and bridges, and (as this bad
and iron time does not make any use of these arms now, but rejects them)
mortars; for the shaping of the mortars, battering-rams, strengthened
cannons, and arquebuses, and especially for the shape and proportions of
all fortresses and rocks, bastions, strongholds, fences, mines,
countermines, trenches, loop-holes, casemates; for the entrenchments for
horsemen, ravelins, gabions, battlements, for the invention of bridges and
ladders, for the emplacement of camps, for the order of the lines,
measurement of the squadrons, for the difference and design of arms, for
the designs of the banners and standards, for the devices on the shields
and helmets, and also for new coats of arms, crests and medals which are
given on the field to those who show great prowess, for the painting of
trappings (I mean, the giving of instruction to other lesser painters as
to how they ought to be painted, and seeing that the excellent painters
can paint the trappings of the horses and the shields and even the tents
for valorous princes); for the manner of dividing and selecting
everything; for the description and assortment of the colours and
liveries, which but few can determine. Moreover, drawing is of exceedingly
great use in war to show in sketches the position of distant places and
the shape of the mountains and the harbours, as well as that of the ranges
of mountains and of the bays and seaports, for the shape of the cities and
fortresses, high and low, the walls and the gates and their position, to
show the roads and the rivers, the beaches and the lagoons and marshes
which