Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 2.djvu/371

Rh ornament, and in beauty of manner; this may be seen in many of his pictures, wherein the countenances smile, as in nature, while the eyes look forth with the most life-like animation, or in other cases wherein the spectator perceives the pulses actually beating, accordingly as it pleased the pencil of the artist to portray them.

But whoever shall examine the mural paintings of Polidoro and Maturino, will see figures in such attitudes as it would seem almost impossible to represent, and will inquire, with amazement, how they have found means, not to describe in discourse, which might easily be done, but to depict with the pencil, all the extraordinary circumstances exhibited by them with so much facility; nor can we sufficiently marvel at the skill and dexterity with which they have represented the deeds of the Romans, as they really happened.

Many others have there been who have given life to the figures depicted by them, but are now themselves numbered with the dead, as for example, II Rosso, Fra Sebastiano, Giulio Romano, and Perin del Yaga; of living artists, who are rendering themselves most widely known by their own acts, it needs not that I should now speak, but a fact which belongs to the universal history of our art may be here mentioned, namely, that the masters have now brought it to a degree of perfection which renders it possible for him who possesses design, invention, and colouring, to produce six pictures in one year, whereas formerly those earlier masters of our art, could produce one picture only in six years; to the truth of this I can bear indubitable testimony, both from what I have seen and from what I have done, while the paintings are nearer to perfection, and more highly finished, than were formerly those of the most distinguished masters.

But he who bears the palm from all, whether of the living or the dead; he who transcends and eclipses every other, is the divine Michelagnolo Buonarotti, who takes the first place, not in one of these arts only, but in all three. This