...plants — will you receive no other pleasure than to hear such an effect described by the poet? Here the poet responds, and yields to the above reasons, but says that he surpasses the painter, because he makes men speak and reason with diverse fictions, in which he feigns things that are not, and that he will move men to take up arms, and that he will describe the sky, the stars, and nature, and the arts, and everything. To whom it is answered that none of these things of which he speaks is his own profession; but that, if he wishes to speak and orate, one must be persuaded that in this he is surpassed by the orator; and if he speaks of astrology, that he has stolen it from the astrologer, and of philosophy, from the philosopher; and that in effect poetry has no seat of its own, nor deserves one otherwise than a peddler, a gatherer of merchandise made by diverse artisans. But the deity of the science of painting considers works both human and divine, which are bounded by their surfaces — that is, by the lines that are the boundaries of bodies — with which she commands the sculptor the perfection of his statues. She, with her first principle, that is, drawing [disegno], teaches the architect to make his building pleasing to the eye; she [teaches] the composers of diverse vases, the goldsmiths, the weavers, the embroiderers; she has found the characters with which the diverse languages are expressed; she has given their figures to the arithmeticians; she has taught geometry its figuration; she teaches the perspectivists and astrologers and the machinists and engineers.

[24] Of the eye.