And perhaps notwithstanding
your great imagination you will not have been as much struck as I have
been with the conformity which letters have with painting (for you will
certainly hold letters to be a part of painting); nor by how these two
sciences are such legitimate sisters that, if one be separated from the
other, neither is perfect, although it seems that these present times keep
them in some way separated. But yet every learned and consummate man will
find that in all his works he is always exercising to a great extent the
office of a good painter, painting and colouring some intention of his
with much care and devotion. Now in opening the old books, the famous ones
are few which are not like painting; and it is certain that those which
are the heaviest and most confused are so for no other reason but because
the writers are not good draughtsmen and are not very skilful in drawing
and dividing up their work; and the most facile and terse are those of the
best draughtsman. And even Quintilian in the perfection of his _Rhetoric_
lays it down that not only in the division of the words his orator should
draw, but that with his own hand he should know how to sketch and draw;
and hence it is, Senhor M. Angelo, that you may at times call a great man
of letters or a great preacher a good painter; and a great draughtsman you
may call a man of letters, and whosoever most penetrates into real
antiquity will find that painting and sculpture were both called painting,
and that in the time of Demosthenes they called _writing_ 'antigraphia,'
which means _drawing_, and it was a word common to both these sciences,
and that the writings of Agatharco can be called the painting of
Agatharco.
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