Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/133

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what garments he pleases ; his dwelling is full of beautiful pictures, and it is clean ; sometimes he has music or readers of diverse and pleasant works, which, without any noise of hammers or other confused sounds, are heard with great plea- sure.

37.

There can be no comparison between the talent, art and theory of painting and that of sculpture, which leaves perspective out of account, — per- spective which is produced by the quality of the material and not of the artist. And if the sculptor says that he cannot restore the superabundant substance which has once been removed from his work, I answer that he who removes too much has but little understanding and is no master. Be- cause if he has mastered the proportions he will not remove anything unnecessarily; therefore we will say that this disadvantage is inherent in the artist and not in the material. But I will not speak of such men, for they are spoilers of mar- ble and not artists. Artists do not trust to the judgement of the eye, because it is always deceptive, as is proved by him who wishes to divide a line into two equal parts by the eye, and is often deceived in the experiment; wherefore the good judges always fear— a fear which is not shared by the ignorant —to trust to their own judgement, and on this ac- count they proceed by continually checking the

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