Note 158 — Chapter VI

See what Vasari writes of the revolution of Giorgione in 1507 when Giorgione began to "pose before him living and natural things, to represent them as nearly as he could by painting directly with colour without making any drawing." He adds that Giorgione did not perceive that it is necessary, if you wish to arrange and balance a composition, to put it first on paper. "In fact the mind can not very well see or perfectly imagine its own creations, if it does not reveal and explain its thought to the eyes of the body which will aid it in judging—we must add that in drawing on paper one succeeds in filling the mind with beautiful conceptions and learns to make natural objects from memory without being obliged to have them always before you." (Vasari, Ed. 1811, Vol. III, pp. 427-428.) The whole point of view of Florentine art of the sixteenth century is in this naïve avowal.