he point of rising;
all in the air foreshortened with full conquest over every difficulty.
In addition, you discovered groups of figures sketched in various
methods, some outlined with charcoal, some etched with strokes, some
shadowed with the stump, some relieved in white-lead; the master
having sought to prove his empire over all materials of
draughtsmanship. The craftsmen of design remained therewith astonished
and dumbfounded, recognising the furthest reaches of their art
revealed to them by this unrivalled masterpiece. Those who examined
the forms I have described, painters who inspected and compared them
with works hardly less divine, affirm that never in the history of
human achievement was any product of a man's brain seen like to them
in mere supremacy. And certainly we have the right to believe this;
for when the Cartoon was finished, and carried to the Hall of the
Pope, amid the acclamation of all artists, and to the exceeding fame
of Michelangelo, the students who made drawings from it, as happened
with foreigners and natives through many years in Florence, became men
of mark in several branches. This is obvious, for Aristotele da San
Gallo worked there, as did Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Raffaello Sanzio da
Urbino, Francesco Granaccio, Baccio Bandinelli, and Alonso Berughetta,
the Spaniard; they were followed by Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio,
Jacopo Sansovino, Rosso, Maturino, Lorenzetto, Tribolo, then a boy,
Jacopo da Pontormo, and Pierin del Vaga: all of them first-rate
masters of the Florentine school."

It does not appear from this that Vasari pretended to have seen the
great Cartoon. Born in 1512, he could not indeed have done so; but
there breathes through his description a gust of enthusiasm, an
afflatus of concurrent witnesses to its surpassing grandeur. Some of
the details raise a suspicion that Vasari had before his eyes the
transcript _en grisaille_ which he says was made by Aristotele da San
Gallo, and also the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. The prominence
given to the ivy-crowned old soldier troubled by his hose confirms the
accuracy of the Holkham picture and the Albertina drawing. But none of
these partial transcripts left to us convey that sense of multitude,
space, and varied action which Vasari's words impress on the
imagination. The fullest, that at Holkham, contains nineteen figures,
and these are schematically arranged in three planes, with outlying
subjects in foreground and background.