Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/49

Rh been had it been entirely executed with his own hand. And this mode of proceeding, which he had derived from Raphael his master, is exceedingly advantageous to the disciple, who obtains much practice thereby, and thus becomes in his turn a good master. It is true, that the student sometimes persuades himself to believe his own powers superior to those of him by whom he should be guided, but if perchance he should lose this guidance, and be deprived too early of the design and direction of the master, before he has attained the due end of his labours, and has acquired firmness in design, and facility in execution, such disciple too often finds that he has been wasting his efforts, and has but involved himself in a sea of errors, amidst the infinite vastness of which he wanders as do the blind.

But let us return to the apartments of the T. From this room of the Psyche we pass into another, with double friezes, and decorated with figures in basso-rilievo, executed in stucco after the designs of Giulio, by Francesco Primaticcio of Bologna, who was then but a youth; and by Giovanni Battista of Mantua. In these friezes are seen all the variously clothed and armed bands of the Soldiers on the column of Trajan at Rome, faithfully copied and executed in a very beautiful manner. Among the decorations of the ceiling in one of the ante-rooms, is a painting in oil, representing Icarus instructed by his father Dtedalus in the art of flying, but who, after he has seen the sign of the crab and the chariot of the sun drawn by four horses, which are finely foreshortened—when he is approaching the sign of the lion, that is to say—is left without his wings, the heat of the sun having melted the wax wherewith they were fastened; near this is another picture, in which he is seen again, but now plunging down from the heights, and with so