he lights so bright, that when the impression
was pulled off they appeared to have been heightened with lead-white.
Ugo executed in this manner, after a design drawn by Raffaello in
chiaroscuro, a woodcut in which is a Sibyl seated who is reading, with a
clothed child giving her light with a torch. Having succeeded in this,
Ugo took heart and attempted to make prints with wood-blocks of three
tints. The first gave the shadow; the second, which was lighter in tone,
made the middle tint, and the third, cut deeply, gave the higher lights
of the ground and left the white of the paper. And the result of this,
also, was so good, that he executed a woodcut of AEneas carrying Anchises
on his back, while Troy is burning. He then made a Deposition from the
Cross, and the story of Simon Magus, which had been used by Raffaello
for the tapestries of the above-mentioned Chapel; and likewise David
slaying Goliath, and the Flight of the Philistines, of which Raffaello
had prepared the design in order to paint it in the Papal Loggie. And
after many other works in chiaroscuro, he executed in the same manner a
Venus, with many Loves playing about her.

Now since, as I have said, he was a painter, I must not omit to tell
that he painted in oils, without using a brush, but with his fingers,
and partly, also, with other bizarre instruments of his own, an
altar-piece which is on the altar of the Volto Santo in Rome. Upon this
altar-piece, being one morning with Michelagnolo at that altar to hear
Mass, I saw an inscription saying that Ugo da Carpi had painted it
without a brush; and I laughed and showed the inscription to
Michelagnolo, who answered, also with a laugh, that it would have been
better if he had used a brush, for then he might have done it in a
better manner.

The method of executing these two kinds of woodcuts, in imitation of
chiaroscuro, thus invented by Ugo da Carpi, was the reason that, many
following in his steps, a great number of most beautiful prints were
produced by others. For after him Baldassarre Peruzzi, the painter of
Siena, made a similar woodcut in chiaroscuro, which was very beautiful,
of Hercules driving Avarice, a figure laden with vases of gold and
silver, from Mount Parnassus, on which are the Muses in various lovely
attitudes. And Francesco Parmigiano engraved a Diogenes for a sheet of
royal folio laid open, which was a finer print than any that Ugo ever
produced. The same Parmigiano, having shown the metho