Leone Battista Alberti wrote (De architectura) that "the art of building... in Italy [had] achieved perfect maturity", that the Romans had "created such a perfect art of building that there was in it nothing mysterious, hidden or unclear." This was yet another formulation of the concept of perfection. Daniele Barbaro, in his 1567 translation of Vitruvius, classically defined perfection as "that which lacks nothing and to which nothing can be added". The Renaissance showed a marked concern with preeminence in perfection. Leonardo concluded that the most perfect of the arts was painting. In 1546 Benedetto Varchi compared great masters in the arts. Others compared art and science, art and nature, and perfection in the arts of the ancients with that in the modern masters. The 16th century saw comparisons of their music, the 17th — of their visual arts and especially of their poetry. These comparisons construed perfection fairly loosely; the concept was treated more strictly by architects. The Renaissance distinguished a variety of properties to perfection. It was variously held to be: an objective property (Petrarch, who opposed perfection to other esthetic qualities such as grace); specific to art rather than to nature (Vasari); a rare property (Alberti felt that not even Greek architecture had attained perfection); a property of the whole work rather than of its parts (Alberti); a conjunction of many values (Lodovico Dolce thought Raphael perfect because Raphael had manifold talent, as opposed to the one-sided Michelangelo); something that required not merely talent but art, that is, skill (Vasari); not the sole value in a work of art (Vasari differentiated perfection from grace; Renaissance Platonists such as Ficino viewed perfection as a divine attribute). In the eclectic view of the late Renaissance, perfection in a work would require uniting the talents of many artists. Paolo Pino held that only that painter would be perfect who combined the talents of Titian and Michelangelo. The concept of perfection was harder to apply to Renaissance literature but became so common — often, linked to "eccelente" — as to become banal. Its frequent application brought about its relativization and even subjectivization. Beginning with Serlio and Palladio, perfection in art had become less important, less definite, less objective. The striving for perfection no longer had the importance for men of letters that it did for the great architects. But the 17th century still revered perfection, as shown by the appearance of