Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/364

350 were placed; not only showing how, in order manifestly to draw back or retire, they must gradually be diminished, but also giving the precise manner and degree required for this, which had previously been done by chance, or effected at the discretion of the artist, as he best could. He also discovered the method of turning the arches and cross-vaulting of ceilings; taught how floors are to be foreshortened by the convergence of the beams; showed how the artist must proceed, to represent columns bending around the sharp corners of a building, so that, when drawn in perspective, they efface the angle, and cause it to seem level. To pore over all these matters, Paolo would remain alone, seeing scarcely any one, and remaining almost like a hermit for weeks and months in his house, without suffering himself to be approached. But, however difficult and beautiful these things may be, yet, if he had expended the time given to them in the study of figures, he would have done much better; for, although his drawing of the latter is tolerably good, yet it wants much of the perfection which he might have given it by a more discreetly regulated attention; but by thus consuming his hours in pondering these devices, he found himself steeped in poverty all the days of his life, instead of attaining to the celebrity which he might otherwise have acquired. When, therefore, Paolo would sometimes exhibit his “mazzocchi,” some pointed, others square, and all drawn in perspective under various aspects, his spheres having seventytwo facettes, like diamond points, with a morsel of chip bent upwards on each plane, and all the other strange whimsies over which he exhausted his strength, and wasted his time, to the sculptor Donatello (who was his intimate friend), the latter would say to him, “Ah, Paolo, with this perspective of thine, thou art leaving the substance for the shadow. These things are serviceable to those only who work at inlaying of wood (tarsia), seeing that it is their trade to use chips and shavings, with circles and spirals, and squares, and such-like matters.”