een proved to be equal to that of three other senses, because we
elect to lose our sense of hearing, smell and touch rather than our
eyesight. For he who loses his sight is deprived of the beauty of the
universe, and is like to one who is confined during his lifetime in a
tomb, in which he enjoys life and motion.

Now seest thou not that the eye comprehends the beauty of the whole
world? It is the head of astrology; it creates cosmography; it gives
counsel and correction to all the human arts; it impels {84} men to
seek diverse parts of the world; it is the principle of mathematics;
its science is most certain; it has measured the height and the
magnitude of the stars; it has discovered the elements and their
abodes; it has been able to predict the events of the future, owing to
the course of the stars; it has begotten architecture and perspective
and divine painting. O most excellent above all the things created by
God! What praise is there which can express thy nobility? What
peoples, what tongues, are they who can perfectly describe thy true
working? It is the window of the human body, through which the soul
gazes and feasts on the beauty of the world; by reason of it the soul
is content with its human prison, and without it this human prison is
its torment; and by means of it human diligence has discovered fire by
which the eye wins back what the darkness has stolen from it. It has
adorned nature with agriculture and pleasant gardens. But what need is
there for me to indulge in long and elevated discourse? What thing is
there which acts not by reason of the eye? It impels men from the East
to the West; it has discovered navigation; and in this it excels
nature, because the simple products of the earth are finite and the
works which the eye makes over to the hands are infinite, as the
painter shows in his portrayal of countless forms of animals, herbs,
plants and places.

{85}

[Sidenote: Music the Sister of Painting]

24.

Music should be given no other name than the sister of painting,
inasmuch as it is subject to the hearing,--a sense inferior to the
eye,--and it produces harmony by the unison of its proportioned parts,
which are brought into operation at the same moment and are constrained
to come to life and die in one or more harmonic times; and time is, as
it were, the circumference of the parts which constitute the harmony,
in the same way as the outline constitutes the circumference of limbs