Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/368

354 fall. This is in a very good manner: it is well and carefully executed; and in these pictures, Paolo took pains to vary the colouring of the trees, a thing which it was not yet usual for the masters to accomplish very successfully. With respect to the landscapes, in like manner, Paolo was the first among the old painters who acquired a name for his labours in this branch of art, which he conducted to a higher degree of perfection than had been attained in it by the artists who preceded him. It is true that those who came after him, succeeded much better than he had done; since, with all his pains, he could never impart to his landscapes that softness and harmony which have been given to works of this class in our times, by painting them in oil. It was quite enough for Paolo if he drew according to the rules of perspective, representing things as they stood, and giving all that he saw: fields, that is to say, with their ditches, their furrows, the ploughs on them, and every other minutia of the kind, in his own dry and hard manner; whereas if he had selected the most effective characteristics of things, and represented such parts only as redound to the good general effect of the picture, he wrould have approached much more nearly to perfection. When he had completed these paintings, he executed others, in the same cloister, beneath two pictures, which are from the hand of a different master; and lower down in the cloister, he painted the deluge, with the ark of Noah. In that wrork, Paolo pourtrayed the dead bodies, the face of the tempest raging around, the fury of the winds, the flashes of the lightning, the torrents of rain, the destruction of the trees, and the terror of men, with so much art and ability, that no words could sufficiently express the merits of this work. In the background is a dead body, of which a raven is tearing out the eyes; the foreshortening of this is very good: there is also a boy, whose drowned corpse is represented as greatly swollen by the water. He has, more-