Note 27 — Chapter I

This remark is evidently derived by Vasari from Leon Battista Alberti, who writes as follows in De Re Aedificatoria, Lib. II, ‘At nos de porphirite lapide compertum habemus non modo flammis non excoqui, verum et contigua quaeque circumhereant saxa intra fornacem reddere ut ignibus ne quidquam satis exquoquantur.’ The sense of ‘excoqui’ in this passage, and of Vasari’s ‘cuocer,’ is somewhat obscure, but can be interpreted by reference to old writings on stones, in which great importance is given to their comparative power of resistance to fire. See Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXVI, 22, etc., etc. Theophrastus, Περὶ Λίθων, § 4, has the following: ‘Stones have many special properties ... for some are consumed by fire and others resist it ... and in respect of the action of the fire and the burning they show many differences....’ The ‘excoqui’ of Alberti probably refers to the resistance of porphyry to the fire as compared with the submission to it of stones like limestone, which are ‘burnt out’ or calcined by the heat. Vasari’s ‘non si cuoce’ is not an adequate translation of Alberti’s word ‘excoqui.’ With a blast heat porphyry fuses to a sort of obsidian or slag, but a moderate heat only causes it to lose its fine purple hue and become grey. This is the ‘rawness’ implied in Vasari’s word ‘incrudelisce.’ To us rawness suggests raw meat which is redder in colour than cooked, but the Italians, who are not great meat eaters, would have in their minds the action of fire on cakes and similar comestibles that darken when baked, and an Italian artist would think too of the action of fire on clay, ‘che viene rossa quando ella è cotta’ as he says in chapter XXV of the ‘Introduction’ to Painting. See Frontispiece, where A1, compared with A, shows the effect of fire on the stone.