“But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead, transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts, but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable, visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in the round, with the point of his chisel.” UNITY OF DESIGN IN THE RENAISSANCE The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549: “In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting. That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why my serving-maid would have written better!”