True Art

John has this book I started reading on the trip. It is essentially the beginning of art history, written by Vasari. He was born in the early 1500s and started recording the lives and stories of the artists he encountered in Italy. He was an artist himself. It is incredible to read accounts of what these artists were like or how certain pieces, like the Duomo's dome, actually came into being. I am enjoying it.
In Vasari's intro he says the following. I thought about this while we were on the trip seeing such amazing pieces of art and architecture. I was thinking about why it is so enjoyable and almost worshipful for me to sit and look at something that beautiful, something that took so much of someone's time and effort and heart to create so many years ago. Then I started reading Vasari and he captured it well:
"I would say that design, the basis of both arts (sculpture and painting), or rather the very soul which conceives and nourishes within itself all the aspects of the intellect, existed in absolute perfection at the origin of all other things when God on high, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting."