n made, bear witness for ever to the slips of
the chisel or to the small judgment of the sculptor. This never happens
to painters, for the reason that at every slip of the brush or error of
judgment that might befall them they have time, recognizing it
themselves or being told by others, to cover and patch it up with the
very brush that made it; which brush, in their hands, has this advantage
over the sculptor's chisels, that it not only heals, as did the iron of
the spear of Achilles, but leaves its wounds without a scar.

To these things the painters, answering not without disdain, say, in the
first place, that if the sculptors wish to discuss the matter on the
ground of the Scriptures the chief nobility is their own, and that the
sculptors deceive themselves very grievously in claiming as their work
the statue of our first father, which was made of earth; for the art of
this performance, both in its putting on and in its taking off, belongs
no less to the painters than to others, and was called "plastice" by the
Greeks and "fictoria" by the Latins, and was judged by Praxiteles to be
the mother of sculpture, of casting, and of chasing, a fact which makes
sculpture, in truth, the niece of painting, seeing that "plastice" and
painting are born at one and the same moment from design. And they say
that if we consider it apart from the Scriptures, the opinions of the
ages are so many and so varied that it is difficult to believe one more
than the other; and that finally, considering this nobility as they
wish it, in one place they lose and in the other they do not win, as may
be seen more clearly in the Preface to the Lives.

After this, in comparison with the arts related and subordinate to
sculpture, they say that they have many more than the sculptors, because
painting embraces the invention of history, the most difficult art of
foreshortening, all the branches of architecture needful for the making
of buildings, perspective, colouring in distemper, and the art of
working in fresco, an art different and distinct from all the others;
likewise working in oils on wood, on stone, and on canvas; illumination,
too, an art different from all the others; the staining of glass,
mosaics in glass, the art of inlaying and making pictures with coloured
woods, which is painting; making sgraffito[2] work on houses with iron
tools; niello[3] work and printing from copper, both members of
painting; goldsmith's enamelling, and the inlayi