any of those
which you have mentioned, sir, only the painting which I so much vaunt and
praise will be the imitation of some single thing amongst those which
immortal God made with great care and knowledge and which He invented and
painted, like to a Master: and so downwards, whether animals or birds,
dispensing perfection according as each thing merits it. And in my
judgment that is the excellent and divine painting which is most like and
best imitates any work of immortal God, whether a human figure, or a wild
and strange animal, or a simple and easy fish, or a bird of the air or any
other creature. And this neither with gold nor silver nor with very fine
tints, but drawn only with a pen or a pencil, or with a brush in black and
white. To imitate perfectly each of these things in its species seems to
me to be nothing else but to desire to imitate the work of immortal God.
And yet that thing will be the most noble and perfect in the works of
painting which in itself reproduced the thing which is most noble and of
the greatest delicacy and knowledge. And what barbarous judge is there
that cannot understand that the foot of a man is more noble than his shoe?
His skin than that of the sheep from which his clothes are made? And who
from this will proceed to find the merit and degree in everything? But I
do not mean that, because a cat or a wolf is vile, the man who paints them
skilfully has not as much merit as one who paints a horse, or the body of
a lion, as even (as I have said above) in the simple shape of a fish there
is the same perfection and proportion as in the form of man, and I may say
the same of all the world itself with all its cities. But all must be
ranked according to the work and study which one demands more than
another, and this should be taught to some ignorant persons who have said
that some painters painted faces well but that they could not paint
anything else. Others have said that in Flanders they painted clothes and
trees extremely well, and some have maintained that in Italy they paint
the nude and symmetry or proportions better. And of others they say other
things. But my opinion is that he who knows how to draw well and merely
does a foot or a hand or a neck, can paint everything created in the
world; and yet there are painters who paint everything there is in the
world so imperfectly and so much without worth that it would be better not
to do it at all. One recognises the knowledge of a great m