their master, with the beautiful model of the world for an exemplar, should have given birth to these most noble arts, and from a small beginning, ameliorating them by slow degrees, should have conducted them finally to perfection? I do not intend to deny that there must have been one who made the first commencement, for I know perfectly well that the first principle must have proceeded from some given time, and from some one person; neither will I deny the possibility that one may have assisted another, thus teaching and opening the way to design, to colour, and to relief ; for I know that our art is altogether imitation, of Nature principally, but also, for him who cannot soar so high, of the works of such as he esteems better masters than himself. But what I maintain is, that to claim the positive determination of who this man or these men were, is a perilous thing, nor is it strictly needful that we should know it, since all may see the true source and origin whence the arts have received their birth. The life and fame of the artist is in his works ; but of these works, the first, produced by the earliest artists, were totally lost, as, by degrees, were the second, and perhaps the third, being destroyed by time, which consumes all things ; and as there was then no writer to record the history of these productions, they could not be made known to posterity, at least by this method : and the artists, as well as their works, remained unknown. Thus, when writers began to preserve the memory of persons and events preceding their own times, they could say nothing of those concerning whom no facts had descended to them ; so that the first artists, in their enumeration, would necessarily be those whose memory had been the last to become obscured. In like manner, Homer is commonly said to be the first poet, not because there were none who preceded him—for that there were such, we see clearly from his own works, although they may not have been equal to himself—but because all memory of those earlier poets, whatever they may have been, had been lost for two thousand years. But to cease the discussion of this question, which is rendered too obscure by its extreme antiquity, let us proceed to matters of which we have better knowledge, the perfection of the arts, namely, then- decay and restoration, or rather second birth, of which we can speak on much better grounds.[1]
- ↑ For a more complete dissertation on the subjects here only touched upon by Vasari, see Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, i, i.
