A Treatise on Painting

...touching upon the fact that since the goal of painting is an ingenious imitation of nature, and since it contains within itself—just like all other sciences—various parts that are disjointed and uncomposed, this art can never be perfectly mastered if all these parts are not first demonstrated together. In doing this, great help is offered to us by mathematics, which the ancient Greeks and Latins, not without great and true reason, considered most excellent; by adapting these mathematical principles to the sciences and arts, they acquired through them the highest merit and honor. Nor is there any doubt that those great painters of Greece, whose fame and names alone have reached us, were quite expert in such disciplines. For although the course of the centuries has deprived us of their marvelous works, it nevertheless appears sufficiently clear—both through the records of writers and because we know for certain—that this art was noble, divine, and practiced by men of no common sort among those people. So it was also among our Latins The author uses "Latins" to refer to the ancient Romans., until, through the unhappy turns of time and the extinction of the Roman Empire, it remained in Italy—along with every other noble discipline—forgotten and buried.

Through the genius and virtue of our Italians, it then began to revive in the 14th Century original: "Secolo XIV". And although those first good masters did not have the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures before their eyes, they nonetheless devoted themselves to a perfect imitation of nature and truth. One discerns in their figures such vitality and beauty that they are admired even among the most beautiful modern works. And if they erred somewhat in foreshortenings scorci: the technique of depicting an object or figure in a picture in depth and in the natural attitudes of the body, and even more so in perspective, those paintings conversely improve so much in their coloring and the expressions of the faces—in which the movements of the soul are seen expressed with admirable skill—that we could not, without the stain of ingratitude, deny to Giotto, Simone of Siena Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344), a major figure in Sienese painting., Masaccio, Blessed Angelico Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455)., and the remaining host of those first superior craftsmen the boast of having, as much as was then possible, well considered and better understood the disciplines of art. Once that disproportion and clumsiness, which the barbarism of the times had imposed upon them, was stripped away by these men, there still remained a void in this art: and this was precisely Philosophy, which, just as had happened among the Latins and Greeks, was destined to...