each according to the times wherein they
lived, step by step from Cimabue down to our own time; not touching on
the ancients save in so far as it may concern our subject, seeing that
no more can be said of them than those so many writers have said who
have come down to our own age. I will treat thoroughly of many things
that appertain to the science of one or other of the said arts; but
before I come to the secrets of these, or to the history of the
craftsmen, it seems to me right to touch a little on a dispute, born and
bred between many without reason, as to the sovereignty and nobility,
not of architecture, which they have left on one side, but of sculpture
and painting; there being advanced, on one side and on the other, many
arguments whereof many, if not all, are worthy to be heard and discussed
by their craftsmen.

I say, then, that the sculptors, as being endowed, perchance by nature
and by the exercise of their art, with a better habit of body, with more
blood, and with more energy, and being thereby more hardy and more fiery
than the painters, in seeking to give the highest rank to their art,
argue and prove the nobility of sculpture primarily from its antiquity,
for the reason that God Almighty made man, who was the first statue; and
they say that sculpture embraces many more arts as kindred, and has many
more of them subordinate to itself than has painting, such as
low-relief, working in clay, wax, plaster, wood, and ivory, casting in
metals, every kind of chasing, engraving and carving in relief on fine
stones and steel, and many others which both in number and in difficulty
surpass those of painting. And alleging, further, that those things
which stand longest and best against time and can be preserved longest
for the use of men, for whose benefit and service they are made, are
without doubt more useful and more worthy to be held in love and honour
than are the others, they maintain that sculpture is by so much more
noble than painting as it is more easy to preserve, both itself and the
names of all who are honoured by it both in marble and in bronze,
against all the ravages of time and air, than is painting, which, by its
very nature, not to say by external accidents, perishes in the most
sheltered and most secure places that architects have been able to
provide. Nay more, they insist that the small number not merely of their
excellent but even of their ordinary craftsmen, in contrast to the
infinite num