readily, seeing that
study, when it is used in that way to obtain finish, gives dryness
to the manner.

After them, indeed, their successors were enabled to attain to it
through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited
by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the
Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus,
the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which,
both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy
roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with
certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure
but only a movement of certain parts, and are revealed with a most
perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness,
hardness, and sharpness of manner, which had been left to our art by
the excessive study of Piero della Francesca, Lazzaro Vasari, Alesso
Baldovinetti, Andrea dal Castagno, Pesello, Ercole Ferrarese,
Giovanni Bellini, Cosimo Rosselli, the Abbot of S. Clemente,
Domenico del Ghirlandajo, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna,
Filippo, and Luca Signorelli. These masters sought with great
efforts to do the impossible in art by means of labour, particularly
in foreshortenings and in things unpleasant to the eye, which were
as painful to see as they were difficult for them to execute. And
although their works were for the most part well drawn and free from
errors, yet there was wanting a certain resolute spirit which was
never seen in them, and that sweet harmony of colouring which the
Bolognese Francia and Pietro Perugino first began to show in their
works; at the sight of which people ran like madmen to this new and
more lifelike beauty, for it seemed to them quite certain that
nothing better could ever be done. But their error was afterwards
clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a
beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the
modern--besides the force and boldness of his drawing, and the
extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of
nature exactly as they are--with good rule, better order, right
proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in
resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly
said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da
Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his
pictu