musician says that his art can be compared with that of the painter
because by the art of the painter a body of many members is composed,
and the spectator apprehends its grace in as many harmonious rhythms
... as there are times in which it lives and dies; and by these rhythms
... its grace plays with the soul, which dwells in the body of the
spectator. But the painter replies that the body composed of human
limbs does not afford the delectable harmonious rhythms in which beauty
must live and die, but renders it permanent for many years, and is of
such great excellence that it preserves the life of this harmony of
concordant limbs which nature with all her force could not preserve.

How many pictures have preserved the semblance of divine beauty of
which time or death had in a brief space destroyed the living example:
and the work of the painter has become more honoured than that of
nature, his master!

If thou, O musician, sayest that painting is mechanical because it is
wrought by the work of the hands, music is wrought by the mouth, but
{88} not by the tasting faculties of the mouth; just and as the hand is
employed indeed in the case of painting, but not for its faculties of
touch. Words are less worthy than actions. But thou, writer of
science, dost thou not copy with thy hand, and write what is in thy
mind, as the painter does? And if thou wast to say that music is
formed of proportion, by proportion have I wrought painting, as thou
shalt see.

[Sidenote: Poet Painter and Musician]

27.

There is the same difference between the representation of the embodied
works of the painter and those of the poet as there is between complete
and dismembered bodies, because the poet in describing the beauty or
the ugliness of any body reveals it to you limb by limb and at diverse
times, and the painter shows the whole at the same time. The poet
cannot express in words the true likeness of the limbs which compose a
whole, as can the painter, who places it before you with the truth of
nature. And the same thing befalls the poet as the musician, who sings
by himself a song composed for four singers; and he sings the treble
first, then the tenor, then the alto and then the bass, whence there
results no grace of harmonious concord such as harmonious rhythms
produce. And the poet is like a beautiful countenance which reveals
itself to you feature by feature, that by so doing you may never be
{89} satisfied by its bea