labour looks for its reward.  And if a poet should say:  “I will invent a fiction with a great purpose,” the painter can do the same, as Apelles painted Calumny.  If you were to say that poetry is more eternal, I say the works of a coppersmith are more eternal still, for time preserves them longer than your works or ours; nevertheless they have not much imagination [29].  And a picture, if painted on copper with enamel colours may be yet more permanent.  We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.  If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy.  Poetry describes the action of the mind, painting considers what the mind may effect by the motions [of the body].  If poetry can terrify people by hideous fictions, painting can do as much by depicting the same things in action.  Supposing that a poet applies himself to represent beauty, ferocity, or a base, a foul or a monstrous thing, as against a painter, he may in his ways bring forth a variety of forms; but will the painter not satisfy more? are there not pictures to be seen, so like the actual things, that they deceive men and animals?

Painting is superior to sculpture (655. 656).

655.

THAT SCULPTURE IS LESS INTELLECTUAL THAN PAINTING, AND LACKS MANY
CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURE.

I myself, having exercised myself no less in sculpture than in painting and doing both one and the other in the same degree, it seems to me that I can, without invidiousness, pronounce an opinion as to which of the two is of the greatest merit and difficulty and perfection.  In the first place sculpture requires a certain light, that is from above, a picture carries everywhere with it its own light and shade.  Thus sculpture owes its importance to light and shade, and the sculptor is aided in this by the nature, of the relief which is inherent in it, while the painter whose art expresses the accidental aspects of nature, places his effects in the spots where nature must necessarily produce them.  The sculptor cannot diversify his work by the various natural colours of objects; painting is not defective in any particular.  The sculptor when he uses perspective cannot make it in any way appear true; that of the painter can appear like a hundred miles beyond the picture itself.  Their works have no aerial perspective whatever, they cannot represent transparent bodies, they cannot represent luminous bodies, nor reflected lights, nor lustrous bodies—­as mirrors and the like polished surfaces, nor mists, nor dark skies, nor an infinite number of things which need not be told for fear of tedium.  As regards the power of resisting time, though they have this resistance [Footnote 19:  From what is here said as to painting on copper it is very evident that Leonardo was not acquainted with the method of painting in oil on thin copper plates, introduced by the Flemish painters of the XVIIth century.  J. LERMOLIEFF has already pointed out that in the