The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen.  If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians had not seen things with your eyes you could not report of them in writing.  And if you, 0 poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood.  And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.  Now which is the worse defect? to be blind or dumb?  Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them.  Now tell me which is the nearer to the actual man:  the name of man or the image of the man.  The name of man differs in different countries, but his form is never changed but by death.

654.

And if the poet gratifies the sense by means of the ear, the painter does so by the eye—­the worthier sense; but I will say no more of this but that, if a good painter represents the fury of a battle, and if a poet describes one, and they are both together put before the public, you will see where most of the spectators will stop, to which they will pay most attention, on which they will bestow most praise, and which will satisfy them best.  Undoubtedly painting being by a long way the more intelligible and beautiful, will please most.  Write up the name of God [Christ] in some spot and setup His image opposite and you will see which will be most reverenced.  Painting comprehends in itself all the forms of nature, while you have nothing but words, which are not universal as form is, and if you have the effects of the representation, we have the representation of the effects.  Take a poet who describes the beauty of a lady to her lover and a painter who represents her and you will see to which nature guides the enamoured critic.  Certainly the proof should be allowed to rest on the verdict of experience.  You have ranked painting among the mechanical arts but, in truth, if painters were as apt at praising their own works in writing as you are, it would not lie under the stigma of so base a name.  If you call it mechanical because it is, in the first place, manual, and that it is the hand which produces what is to be found in the imagination, you too writers, who set down manually with the pen what is devised in your mind.  And if you say it is mechanical because it is done for money, who falls into this error—­if error it can be called—­more than you?  If you lecture in the schools do you not go to whoever pays you most?  Do you do any work without pay?  Still, I do not say this as blaming such views, for every form of