In his 1607 treatise, Idea of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , the painter Federigo Zuccaro claimed that human being was creative being:
“Because of His goodness and to show in a small replica the excellence of his divine art, [God] having created man in His image and likeness with respect to the soul, endowing it with an immaterial, incorruptible substance and the powers of thinking and willing, with which man could rise above and command all the other creatures of the World except the Angel and be almost a second God, He wished to grant him the ability to form in himself an inner intellectual design; so that by means of it he could know all the creatures and could form in himself a new world . . . so that with this Design, almost imitating God and vying with Nature, he could produce an infinite number of artificial things resembling natural ones, and by means of painting and sculpture make new Paradises visible on earth.”
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