...which nature with all her powers could not preserve. How many paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty whose natural model time or death has soon destroyed, so that the painter's work has remained worthier than that of nature, his mistress!

[31] The painter assigns the gradations of the things set before the eye, as the musician does of the voices set before the ear.

Although the things set before the eye touch one another degree by degree, nonetheless I shall set my rule at intervals of twenty by twenty braccia, as the musician has done among the voices; for though the voice be joined and linked together, he has nevertheless set gradations from voice to voice, calling one the first, the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth, and so from step to step he has given names to the variety of raising and lowering the voice.

If you, O musician, will say that painting is mechanical because it is worked with the exercise of the hands, and that music is performed with the mouth, which is a human organ (but not by way of the sense of taste, as the hand is by the sense of touch) - words are still less worthy than deeds. But you, writer of the sciences, do you not copy with your hand, writing down what stands in the mind, as the painter does? And if you should say that music is composed of proportion, I too have followed painting by this very same means, as you will better see.

[31 a] a. After this comes sculpture, a most worthy art, but not worked with so great an excellence of intellect, inasmuch as...