What culture is there in a clay jug I ask you? Adolf Hitler
The initial aim of German art has now been achieved. Just as our architectural recovery began here in Munich so did our purging of painting and sculpture three years ago. The whole swindle of decadent, sickening fashionable art has been swept away. A new standard of decency has been attained. Adolf Hitler
In all Goering amassed artworks to the value of several hundred million Marks ... Trains rolled into Germany full of stolen art treasures. Hitler’s Henchmen: Goering the Marshall
Custom that is before the law; Nature that is above all art. Samuel Daniel, 1563-1619, English poet & dramatist
There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art than in adhering to them, and ... There is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art than in the works of a little genius who not only knows but scrupulously observes them. Joseph Addison
Paint like nobody is watching and paint like you don’t need any money. John Ferrie
How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670
‘Painters and poets alike have always had licence to dare anything.’ We know that, and we both claim and permit others this indulgence. Horace, Ars Poetica
Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up. Miguel de Cervantes
Ruskin said, Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 1/13 ***** The Skin of Our Teeth, BBC 1969
What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms yet but I think I can recognise it when I see it. ibid.
Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies. ibid.
The 10th century produced work as splendid and as technically skilful and even as dedicated as any other age. ibid.
9,816. This internationalism of the 12th century extended to architecture and sculpture. (Art & Civilisation & Architecture & Sculpture) Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 2/13: The Great Thaw
9,817. Great things were to be done in the next centuries of high Gothic. (Art & Civilisation & Architecture & Gothic) ibid.
9,818. One book remains: The Very Rich Hours, which is one of the miracles of art history. (Art & Civilisation & Book) Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 3/13: Romance & Reality
As an aid to realise perspective is of no importance – the realistic painters of Flanders got on very well without it. But as a symbol it means something, and as a symbol it passes into the decorative arts of early renaissance. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 4/13: Man the Measure of All Things
Realistic portraiture ... Jan van Eyck – no-one has looked at the human face with a dispassionate eye and recorded his findings with a more delicate eye. ibid.
The first evolved landscape in European painting – the background of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb; the foreground is painted with a medieval sharpness of detail. ibid.
Michelangelo and Raphael were to some extent the creation of Julius: without him Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine ceiling, nor would Raphael have decorated the papal apartments. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 5/13: The Hero as Artist
In the fifteenth century Greco-Roman sculpture had become a shining almost inaccessible model to the more adventurous artists. ibid.
The city fathers also commissioned ... a gigantic figure of David ... What a man! Everyone who met Michelangelo recognised that he had an unequal power of mind and skill of hand. ibid.
The Sistine ceiling passionately asserts the unity of man’s body, mind and spirit. ibid.
Raphael was above all a man of his age. Even in his early work still painted in the clear self-contained style of the fifteenth century he has begun to absorb and harmonise all that was being felt or thought by the finest spirits of his time. He is the supreme harmoniser. ibid.
One more giant: Leonardo da Vinci ... He belongs to no epoch; he fits into no category. ibid.
He was the most relentlessly curious man in history. ibid.
Leonardo’s curiosity was matched by an indefatigable energy. He is never satisfied with a single answer. ibid.
Every dissection was drawn with marvellous precision. ibid.
The golden moment was almost over. But while it lasted man achieved a stature that he has hardly ever achieved before or since. Because to the humanist virtues of intelligence was added the quality of heroic will. For a few years it seemed that there was nothing that the human mind couldn’t master and harmonize. ibid.
Albrecht Durer ... He deliberately painted himself as a traditional pose of Christ. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 6/13: Protest & Communication
Durer shared Leonardo’s curiosity, but it was a curiosity about appearances not about causes. ibid.
No-one has ever described natural objects more minutely. Yet to my eye something is missing – the inner life. ibid.
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment ... fills the whole end wall of the Sistine Chapel. It’s a disturbing, a crushing, work. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 7/13: Grandeur & Obedience
The great artists of the time were all sincere conforming Christians. ibid.
The great religious art of the world in every country is deeply involved with the female principle. ibid.
Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin a baroque picture ... was painted in the same period as his great celebrations of paganism ... The art we call Baroque was a popular art. ibid.
The work of Bernini is ideal and eternal. He was a very great artist ... He not only gave baroque Rome its character but he was the chief source of an international style that has spread all over Europe ... He was dazzlingly precocious ... He became more skilful in the carving of marble than any sculptor has ever been. ibid.
By the 1620s the rich Romans families, who were in fact the families of successive popes, had begun to compete as patrons and collectors. ibid.
Bernini was only twenty-five and the very next year he was made the architect of St Peter’s. ibid.
Bernini is perhaps the only artist in history who has been able to carry through such a vast design over so long a period. ibid.
The Bronze Baldacchino ... It’s incredible ... The perfection of craftsmanship that extends to every detail. ibid.
Light. The light of early morning. The light of Holland. It spreads over the flat fields, it’s reflected in the canals, and it picks out distant towers and spires. This was the inspiration of the first great school of landscape; one might almost say skyscape painting. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 8/13: The Light of Experience
The Harlem painter Frans Hals: He is the supreme extrovert. ibid.
They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy. ibid.
A demand for realism ... Paul Potter’s Bull was one of the most famous pictures in Holland ... Isn’t that fleecy neck of the sheep extraordinary? ibid.
They also got Rembrandt. Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth. And that appeal to experience which had begun with the Reformation. ibid.
His etchings are the fullest communication any artist has made since Durer’s engravings. ibid.
Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible in the light of human experience. But it’s an emotional response based on the belief of the revealed truth. ibid.
Vermeer manages to observe an air of complete naturalism. Yet what a masterpiece of abstract design he creates out of frames and windows and musical instruments. ibid.
The great art of the time was religious art. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 9/13: The Pursuit of Happiness
We have an exceptionally vivid record in the world of Hogarth. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 10/13: The Smile of Reason
Here’s the polling booth with the imbeciles and moribund being persuaded to make their mark. ibid.
The urban society, of which Hogarth has left us many, records plenty of animal spirits but not what we could call by any stretch civilisation. ibid.
The most gifted painter of his day: David. ibid.