a quote for Ary

[abendgules]

 aryanhwy  mentioned that she wants to reproduce the borders of the Visconti book of hours, one scroll at a time, and I said, well, that's exactly what Cennini says you should do.

Here's the quote, from The Craftsman's Handbook, following advice on how to draw on several different media, and how to make the media surfaces.

It's a bit of a 'backhanded compliment' observation, but very much in the author's rather pompous style.

How you should endeavour to copy and draw after as few masters as possible - chapter XXVII 
Now you must forge ahead again, so that you may pursue the course of this theory. You have made your tinted papers; the next thing is to draw. You should adopt this method. Having first practiced drawing for a while as I have taught you above, that is, on a little panel, take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another tomorrow, you wil not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style is distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man's way today, and in the other's tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right. If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.


ETA - link to Ary's resolution