ant in invention and
craftsmanship. Not far away may be seen Psyche, who, surrounded by many
women who are serving and attiring her, sees Phoebus appearing in the
distance among the hills in the chariot of the sun, which is drawn by
four horses; while Zephyr is lying nude upon some clouds, and is blowing
gentle breezes through a horn that he has in his mouth, which make the
air round Psyche balmy and soft. These stories were engraved not many
years since after the designs of Battista Franco of Venice, who copied
them exactly as they were painted from the great cartoons of Giulio by
Benedetto of Pescia and Rinaldo Mantovano, who carried into execution
all the stories except the Bacchus, the Silenus, and the two children
suckled by the goat; although it is true that the work was afterwards
retouched almost all over by Giulio, so that it is very much as if it
had been all painted by him. This method, which he learned from
Raffaello, his instructor, is very useful to young men, who in this way
obtain practice and thereby generally become excellent masters. And
although some persuade themselves that they are greater than those who
keep them at work, such fellows, if their guide fails them before they
are at the end, or if they are deprived of the design and directions for
the work, learn that through having lost or abandoned that guidance too
early they are wandering like blind men in an infinite sea of errors.

But to return to the apartments of the Te; from that room of Psyche one
passes into another full of double friezes with figures in low-relief,
executed in stucco after the designs of Giulio by Francesco Primaticcio
of Bologna, then a young man, and by Giovan Battista Mantovano, in which
friezes are all the soldiers that are on Trajan's Column at Rome,
wrought in a beautiful manner. And on the ceiling, or rather soffit, of
an antechamber is painted in oils the scene when Icarus, having been
taught by his father Daedalus, seeks to rise too high in his flight, and,
after seeing the Sign of Cancer and the chariot of the sun, which is
drawn by four horses in foreshortening, near the Sign of Leo, is left
without his wings, the wax being consumed by the heat of the sun; and
near this the same Icarus may be seen hurtling through the air, and
almost falling upon those who gaze at him, his face dark with the shadow
of death. This invention was so well conceived and imagined by Giulio,
that it seems to be real and true, for in i