If I find that my industry and devotion in this matter meet with my
readers' approval, I shall be encouraged to translate into Latin the
rest of Albrecht's treatise on painting, a work at once more finished
and more laborious than the present. Moreover, his writings on other
subjects will also be looked for, his Geometries and Tichismatics, in
which he explained the fortification of towns according to the system of
the present day. These, however, appear to be all the subjects on which
he wrote books. As to the promise, which I hear certain persons are
making in conversation or in writing, to publish a book by Dürer on the
symmetry of the parts of the horse, I cannot but wonder from what
source they will obtain after his death what he never completed during
his life. Although I am well aware that Albrecht had begun to
investigate the law of truth in this matter too, and had made a certain
number of measurements, I also know that he lost all he had done through
the treachery of certain persons, by whose means it came about that the
author's notes were stolen, so that he never cared to begin the work
afresh. He had a suspicion, or rather a certainty, as to the source
whence came the drones who had invaded his store; but the great man
preferred to hide his knowledge, to his own loss and pain, rather than
to lose sight of generosity and kindness in the pursuit of his enemies.
We shall not, therefore, suffer anything that may appear to be
attributed to Albrecht's authorship, unworthy as it must evidently be of
so great an artist.
A few years ago some tracts also appeared in German, containing rules,
in general faulty and inappropriate, about the same matter. On these I
do not care now to waste words, though the author, unless I am much
mistaken, has not once repented of his publication. But these rules
above-mentioned, which are easily proved to be Albrecht's, not only
because he prepared them himself for publication, but also because of
their own excellence, you will, I think, obtain considerably better here
than from other sources. Not that they are more finished in point of
erudition and learning in the present book than elsewhere, but because
those who interpret them in the author's own workshop, among the
expansions and corrections of his autograph manuscripts and the
variations of his different copies, stand in the light about many
points, which must of necessity seem obscure to others, however learned
they may be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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