o the union of the plaster
and the colours, but the eye does not see the true colours until the
plaster is well dry, nor can the hand judge of anything but of the soft
or the dry, in a manner that anyone who were to call it working in the
dark, or with spectacles of colours different from the truth, would not
in my belief be very far wrong. Nay, I do not doubt at all that such a
name is more suitable for it than for intaglio, for which wax serves as
spectacles both true and good. They say, too, that for this work it is
necessary to have a resolute judgment, to foresee the end in the fresh
plaster and how the work will turn out on the dry; besides that the work
cannot be abandoned so long as the plaster is still fresh, and that it
is necessary to do resolutely in one day what sculpture does in a month.
And if a man has not this judgment and this excellence, there are seen,
on the completion of his work or in time, patches, blotches,
corrections, and colours superimposed or retouched on the dry, which is
something of the vilest, because afterwards mould appears and reveals
the insufficiency and the small knowledge of the craftsmen, even as the
pieces added in sculpture lead to ugliness; not to mention that when it
comes about that the figures in fresco are washed, as is often done
after some time to restore them, what has been worked on the fresh
plaster remains, and what has been retouched on the dry is carried away
by the wet sponge.

They add, moreover, that whereas the sculptors make two figures
together, or at the most three, from one block of marble, they make many
of them on one single panel, with all those so many and so varied
aspects which the sculptors claim for one single statue, compensating
with the variety of their postures, foreshortenings, and attitudes, for
the fact that the work of the sculptors can be seen from every side;
even as Giorgione da Castelfranco did once in one of his pictures,
wherein a figure with its back turned, having a mirror on either side,
and a pool of water at its feet, shows its back in the painting, its
front in the pool, and its sides in the mirrors, which is something that
sculpture has never been able to do. In addition to this, they maintain
that painting leaves not one of the elements unadorned and not abounding
with all the excellent things that nature has bestowed on them, giving
its own light and its own darkness to the air, with all its varieties of
feeling, and filling