[*†500.] Take courage therefore, O ye noble youths! {500.} you legitimate offspring of Minerva, who are born under the influence of a happy planet, and warmed with a celestial fire, which attracts you to the love of science! exercise, while you are young, your whole forces, and employ them with delight in an art, which requires a whole painter. Exercise them, I say, while your boiling youth supplies {505.} you with strength, and furnishes you with quickness, and with vigour; while your mind, yet pure, and void of error, has not taken any ill habitude to vice; while yet your spirits are inflamed with the thirst of novelties, and your mind is filled with the first species of things which present themselves to young imagination, which it gives in keeping to your memory; and which your memory retains for length of time, by reason of the moisture wherewith at that age the brain abounds. [*†503.] You will do well [*†509.] to begin with geometry, and after having made some progress in it, [*†510.] set yourself on designing after the ancient Greeks: [*†511.] and cease {510.} not day or night from labour, till, by your continual practice, you have gained an easy habitude of imitating them in their invention, and in their manner. [*†514.] And when afterwards your judgment shall grow stronger, and come to its maturity with years, it will be very necessary to see and examine one after the other, and part by part, those works which have given so great a reputation to the masters of {515.} the first form in pursuit of that method, which we have taught you here above, and according to the rules which we have given you; such are the Romans, the Venetians, the Parmesans, and the Bologneses. Amongst those excellent persons, Raphael {520.} had the talent of invention for his share, by which he made as many miracles as he made pictures. In which is observed [*†520.] a certain grace which was wholly natural and peculiar to him, and which none since him have been able to appropriate to themselves. Michael Angelo possessed powerfully the part of design, above all others. [*†522.] Julio Romano (educated from his childhood among the muses) has opened to us the treasures of Parnassus: and in the poetry of painting has discovered to our eyes the most sacred mysteries of Apollo, and all {525.} the rarest ornaments which that god is capable of communicating to those works that he inspires; which we knew not before, but only by the recital that the poets made of them. He seems to have painted those famous wars “in which fortune has crowned her triumphant heroes;” and those other glorious events which she has caused in all ages, even with more magnificence and nobleness, than when they were acted in the world.