The Paragone: Harmony of Sight and the Nobility of the Eye
Poetry unfolds in succession; sight embraces beauty all at once
The transcribed prose argues that poetry produces no harmonic proportionality because its parts are born one after another, each dying before the next arrives, whereas the beautiful members of a painted face are grasped all together in a single instant and give divine pleasure. It then reasons that no one, forced to choose, would prefer blindness to the loss of hearing and smell, since to lose sight is to lose the beauty of the world and all created forms. The leaf ends by turning the poet's own rule back on him: painting, which extends to the works of God, is worthier than poetry, which extends only to the lying fictions of human deeds. No drawing appears; only Melzi's fair-copy text.
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Harmonic proportion grasped in an instant
The passage holds that poetry cannot compose harmonic proportionality because its parts arise successively, the following note being born only once the preceding one dies. By contrast the divine proportion of a beautiful face's members is perceived all at once and gives a pleasure the writer judges unsurpassed among works made by man.
Blindness worse than deafness: the primacy of sight
The text argues that any sane judgement, forced to choose, would rather lose hearing and smell than sight, for whoever loses sight loses the beauty of the world and all the forms of created things, while the deaf man loses only sound, called the least thing in the world. It closes by ranking painting above poetry because painting extends to the works of God.