They can express a human form in all the graces, sweetness, and elegancy, but, they miss the authority.  They can hit nothing but smooth cheeks; they cannot express roughness or gravity.  Others aspire to truth so much as they are rather lovers of likeness than beauty.  Zeuxis and Parrhasius are said to be contemporaries; the first found out the reason of lights and shadows in picture, the other more subtlely examined the line.

De stylo.—­Pliny.—­In picture light is required no less than shadow; so in style, height as well as humbleness.  But beware they be not too humble, as Pliny pronounced of Regulus’s writings.  You would think them written, not on a child, but by a child.  Many, out of their own obscene apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words—­as occupy, Nature, and the like; so the curious industry in some, of having all alike good, hath come nearer a vice than a virtue.

De progres. picturae. {93} Picture took her feigning from poetry; from geometry her rule, compass, lines, proportion, and the whole symmetry.  Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture; he added subtlety to the countenance, elegancy to the hair, love-lines to the face, and by the public voice of all artificers, deserved honour in the outer lines.  Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies.  From the optics it drew reasons, by which it considered how things placed at distance and afar off should appear less; how above or beneath the head should deceive the eye, &c.  So from thence it took shadows, recessor, light, and heightnings.  From moral philosophy it took the soul, the expression of senses, perturbations, manners, when they would paint an angry person, a proud, an inconstant, an ambitious, a brave, a magnanimous, a just, a merciful, a compassionate, an humble, a dejected, a base, and the like; they made all heightnings bright, all shadows dark, all swellings from a plane, all solids from breaking.  See where he complains of their painting Chimaeras {94} (by the vulgar unaptly called grotesque) saying that men who were born truly to study and emulate Nature did nothing but make monsters against Nature, which Horace so laughed at. {95} The art plastic was moulding in clay, or potter’s earth anciently.  This is the parent of statuary, sculpture, graving, and picture; cutting in brass and marble, all serve under her.  Socrates taught Parrhasius and Clito (two noble statuaries) first to express manners by their looks in imagery.  Polygnotus and Aglaophon were ancienter.  After them Zeuxis, who was the lawgiver to all painters; after, Parrhasius.  They were contemporaries, and lived both about Philip’s time, the father of Alexander the Great.  There lived in this latter age six famous painters in Italy, who were excellent and emulous of the ancients—­Raphael de Urbino, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, Titian, Antony of Correggio, Sebastian of Venice, Julio Romano, and Andrea Sartorio.