Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi — John Shaqi
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo GaddiVasari, Giorgio
History
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi
Vasari, Giorgio
Art, Italian; Artists -- Italy -- Biography
But let us consider about judgment, as the sculptors wish, and see
whether it is not more necessary to one who works in fresco than to one
who chisels in marble. For here not only is there no place for patience
or for time, which are most mortal enemies to the union of the plaster
and the colours, but the eye does not see the true colours until the
plaster is well dry, nor can the hand judge of anything but of the soft
or the dry, in a manner that anyone who were to call it working in the
dark, or with spectacles of colours different from the truth, would not
in my belief be very far wrong. Nay, I do not doubt at all that such a
name is more suitable for it than for intaglio, for which wax serves as
spectacles both true and good. They say, too, that for this work it is
necessary to have a resolute judgment, to foresee the end in the fresh
plaster and how the work will turn out on the dry; besides that the work
cannot be abandoned so long as the plaster is still fresh, and that it
is necessary to do resolutely in one day what sculpture does in a month.
And if a man has not this judgment and this excellence, there are seen,
on the completion of his work or in time, patches, blotches,
corrections, and colours superimposed or retouched on the dry, which is
something of the vilest, because afterwards mould appears and reveals
the insufficiency and the small knowledge of the craftsmen, even as the
pieces added in sculpture lead to ugliness; not to mention that when it
comes about that the figures in fresco are washed, as is often done
after some time to restore them, what has been worked on the fresh
plaster remains, and what has been retouched on the dry is carried away
by the wet sponge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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