This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit, displaying all the many charms of art, with false syllogisms of tint and hue is a cunning deception of the eye... a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

Sonnet 145 (on a portrait), translated by Edith Grossman