Caroline Polachek Quotes

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.

I am always connected with the Renaissance a lot; that's why I am connected with Pitti Palace.

Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I'd rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.

In Italy, there are so many significant architectural structures in history such as the Pantheon in Rome, or the Duomo.

I wanted to go to Rome. I got an offer to do an Italian film and I went.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

Rome holds my psyche in balance. Whenever I'm there, it's like a holiday.

The very beginning of European aesthetics started from Florence. Everything here was beauty, money, and creativity, the power of the good money.

If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.

I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.... I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art.... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza.

I'm not mannerist. I don't think I'm interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it's about involution or turning in on that.

I like France quite a lot, and I like Italy.

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.

I am a big fan of the Impressionists, and in my school days, I was inspired by Caravaggio, Velazquez and Rembrandt.

Eternal Rome

We Italians would speak to the world as representatives of an age-old civilization of which we had inherited countless works of artists and thinkers --a civilization that entitled us to a place among the foremost Powers in Europe--and all the while we were speaking in the name of a very young state, still administratively incomplete, still divided by the remains of a feudal structure, and lacking economic and military independence.

Jackie's dream was France, but mine was really art and Italy, as that was all I cared about through school. My history of art teacher, who saved my life at Farmington, was obsessed with Bernard Berenson, and I succumbed as well.

For my art GCSE, I did a screen print of the Queen's head that was basically an Andy Warhol rip-off, but I didn't realise.

When you go to the Sistine Chapel with Sophia Loren, it can be quite some time before your thoughts turn to the ceiling.

Italy has a special place in my heart.

I love Rome and the way that you can wander around and find something interesting around every street corner. You can smell the history.