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The first part of the Book on Painting is dedicated to the "paragone", the comparison of the arts. Leonardo compares painting with sculpture, music and poetry. He decrees the superiority of painting, which he calls a speculative activity, denying its traditional collocation among the mechanical arts. The Paragone contains a series of profound considerations made by Leonardo on painting and on the expressive power of the different languages of art and that of literature.
Sculpture and painting
Having worked in both of these arts, Leonardo claims the right to judge the value of each. He describes painting as being "of greater artifice and wonder than sculpture". In sculpture, the subtle invention of light and shadows that makes the painter's creative artifice so marvellous is lacking. Sculpture, moreover, although three-dimensional, cannot suggest the depth of space that is conferred on painting by "aerial perspective."
The Ginevra de' Benci, as the Dama col Mazzolino, was accomplished around 1475, at the time when Leonardo was still engaged in Verrocchio's shop. In comparing the painting with the marble bust, the elements that Leonardo deemed the exclusive prerogatives of painting become apparent: the misty atmosphere, the shining water and the "bodies lustrous and transparent as veiled figures in which the nude flesh appears through the veils that shroud it."
Music and painting
Leonardo calls music the "little sister" of painting. Its ephemeral nature is the fundamental limitation of music, which expires at the very moment in which it is created: "As quick to die as to be born." Leonardo recognizes however the intrinsic affinity between music and painting, which consists of the harmony of proportional ratios. He stresses the concept of harmonious composition of the parts with the whole, on which both of these arts are founded.
Poetry and painting
In comparing the painter to the poet, Leonardo expresses all of the significance of his own concept of the universal nature of painting. The limitation to poetic expression lies in its use of verbal language alone: "You (poets) have nothing but names, which are not universal like forms." The poet's creation, in fact, does not spring directly from the "works of nature", but is realized through "words, which are the works of man."
Moreover, poetry is composed of "parts spoken separately at separate times", that is, one word after another; painting, vice versa, renders the whole of a scene immediately evident through a single image.
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