Baroque Art Quotes

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

I've had the good fortune of studying the 17th-century art of Amsterdam in preparation for a film.

If I were alive in Rubens's time, I'd be celebrated as a model. Kate Moss would be used as a paint brush.

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

Caravaggio was a tormented, defiant, bisexual, angry young man - a maestro who looked nothing like a maestro.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals, I feel the desire to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.

Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

In Rome, I loved seeing the Caravaggios. There are churches in Rome that have Caravaggios, and there's one, not far from Piazza Navona, that has the best, I think: St. Matthew with the money.

To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.

I don't disagree with seeing a Rubens of a nude body, but I don't believe in a nude body in action. With Rubens, thank goodness, they aren't in action.

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

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

Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.

My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I'm much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating.

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

If Caravaggio was a photographer today, I would love to work with him. I love his dark vision - I have a dark vision.

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.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

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.