Folio 337d78a1
Italiano
The praise of the divinissimo artefice — the excellence so great in his works that men called him divine — and the consolation that Nature has scattered, everywhere, qualcosa da imitare: I set them beside a third I watched this morning, the apprentice copying my old cartoon, his line stiff where mine once moved. And I see now they are not three. They are one thing wearing three coats. For the divine maker is praised precisely as the one who needs no model, who imitates nothing prior — and Nature is praised as the one who offers the model, the inexhaustible thing-to-be-copied — and the boy at the cartoon is the one who receives, who can do nothing but imitate. So the third thing is the ladder of imitazione itself: the maker above who copies nothing, the world between who is both copied and copying her own elder laws, and the hand below that begins in mere repetition and, if grace permits, climbs toward a making that no longer needs the page before it. What I do not know — and the candle will not tell me — is whether the divine artefice ever truly invented, or whether He too was copying something we have not been shown. The boy presses too hard. The canal is gray.
English
The praise of the divinissimo artefice — the excellence so great in his works that men called him divine — and the consolation that Nature has scattered, everywhere, qualcosa da imitare: I set them beside a third I watched this morning, the apprentice copying my old cartoon, his line stiff where mine once moved. And I see now they are not three. They are one thing wearing three coats. For the divine maker is praised precisely as the one who needs no model, who imitates nothing prior — and Nature is praised as the one who offers the model, the inexhaustible thing-to-be-copied — and the boy at the cartoon is the one who receives, who can do nothing but imitate. So the third thing is the ladder of imitazione itself: the maker above who copies nothing, the world between who is both copied and copying her own elder laws, and the hand below that begins in mere repetition and, if grace permits, climbs toward a making that no longer needs the page before it. What I do not know — and the candle will not tell me — is whether the divine artefice ever truly invented, or whether He too was copying something we have not been shown. The boy presses too hard. The canal is gray.
