his defence. His
first principle stated broadly that the most useful art was the one
which could most easily be communicated. {xvii} Painting was
communicable to all since its appeal was made to the eye. While the
painter proceeded at once to the imitation of nature, the poet's
instruments were words which varied in every land. He took the
Platonic view of poetry as a lying imitation, removed from truth. He
called the poet a collector of other men's wares, who decked himself in
their plumage. Where poetry presented only a shadow to the
imagination, painting offered a real image to the eye; and the eye, as
the window of the soul through which all earthly beauty was revealed,
the sight, he exclaimed, which had discovered navigation, which had
impelled men to seek the West, was the noblest of all the senses.
Painting spoke only by what it accomplished, poetry ended in the very
words with which it sang its own praises. If, then, poets called
painting dumb poetry, he could retort by dubbing poetry blind painting.
In common with his successors, Leonardo could not escape from this
fallacy, which, in overlooking all save descriptive verse, was destined
to burden aesthetic until demolished by Lessing.

It was the opinion of Leonardo that the temporary nature of music
caused its inferiority to painting. Although durability was in itself
no absolute test,--else the work of coppersmiths would be the highest
art,--yet in any final scale, permanence could not altogether be
disregarded. Music perished in the very act of its creation, {xviii}
while painting preserved the beautiful from the hand of time. "Helen
of Troy, gazing in a mirror, in her old age, wondered how she had twice
been ravished." Mortal beauty would thus vanish, if it were not
rescued by art from destroying age and death.

Leonardo contrasted painting with sculpture, for he had practised both,
and thought himself peculiarly qualified to judge their merit. He
considered the former the nobler art of the two, for sculpture involved
bodily toil and fatigue, while by its very nature it lacked perspective
and atmosphere, colour, and the feeling of space. Painting, on the
other hand, caused by an illusion, was in itself the result of deeper
thought. An even broader test served to convince him of its final
superiority. That art was of highest excellence, he wrote, which
possessed most elements of variety and universality. Painting
contained and reproduced all