Open Letter on Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and the Art of Sculpture

Summary

My friend!

You have written about Greek arts and artists, and I would have liked you to have proceeded in your work as the Greek artists did with theirs. They exposed them to the eyes of the whole world, and especially to those of experts, before they released them from their own hands, and the whole of Greece passed judgment on their works at the great games, especially at the Olympic Games. You know that Aetion took his painting of Alexander's marriage to Roxane there. You would have needed someone greater than Proxenides,1 who passed judgment on the artist there. If you had not been so secretive about your work, then I would have liked to pass on information about it before it was printed to several experts and scholars with whom I have developed an acquaintanceship here.

One of them has seen Italy twice and looked at every one of the paintings of the greatest masters for several whole months in the very places where they were produced. You know that only in this way can one become an expert. A man who can tell you which of Guido Reni's altar pieces have been painted on taffeta or on canvas, and what kind of wood Raphael used for his Transfiguration, and so on, well, I think his judgment would have been decisive!

Another of my acquaintances has studied antiquity and knows it by its reputation:

Callet … artificem solo deprendere odore.