Faldoni, parts 2484 - 2487

 2484. The master will leave the hair of the children unfinished so that if the old man finds any fault with the features he will paint some hair over that part to conceal his supposed mistake. He will make his corrections in tempera over the fresco since he knows that it will not adhere permanently, and years later will fall away and reveal his original masterpiece. 

 2485. The next day as Faldoni was grinding up pigments at his little work table, he tried to watch the master working on the faces as much as possible with a mind to answer a question. “How,” he wanted to know, “does the master succeed in painting those noses into his faces, since the nose has no lines around it at all, and the nostrils make the face look like a pig.”

 2486. He arrived early in the morning and the first thing he did was examine the portraits already finished, and they were no help to him, because the finished faces looked, at least to him, just like faces in real life, so the mystery of how it was done was in no way explained.  

2487. In the morning the master painted three heads in a row, All of the heads were painted in profile, each looking to the right. The master masons had plastered a patch just the size for those three faces, and meanwhile all the surrounding area had been painted over a week ago.