Those who examined the forms I have described, painters who inspected and compared them with works hardly less divine, affirm that never in the history of human achievement was any product of a man's brain seen like to them in mere supremacy.

And certainly we have the right to believe this; for when the Cartoon was finished, and carried to the Hall of the Pope, amid the acclamation of all artists, and to the exceeding fame of Michelangelo, the students who made drawings from it, as happened with foreigners and natives through many years in Florence, became men of mark in several branches.

This is obvious, for Aristotele da San Gallo worked there, as did Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, Francesco Granaccio, Baccio Bandinelli, and Alonso Berughetta, the Spaniard; they were followed by Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio, Jacopo Sansovino, Rosso, Maturino, Lorenzetto, Tribolo, then a boy, Jacopo da Pontormo, and Pierin del Vaga: all of them first-rate masters of the Florentine school." It does not appear from this that Vasari pretended to have seen the great Cartoon.

Born in 1512, he could not indeed have done so; but there breathes through his description a gust of enthusiasm, an afflatus of concurrent witnesses to its surpassing grandeur.

Some of the details raise a suspicion that Vasari had before his eyes the transcript _en grisaille_ which he says was made by Aristotele da San Gallo, and also the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi.