Renaissance Art Quotes

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

Western culture is what gave us Mozart, and Da Vinci, and Wagner, and Beethoven.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.

Some of the greatest achievements ever have been achieved as a result of the Church. The Catholic Church. I'm not Catholic but yeah, the Church, for instance, you take a walk through the Vatican, and to your right is the double helix staircase built, I think, in 1138 or something.

When I was a student looking at Leonardo DaVinci and all those guys - Italian, Dutch, or whatever - it's incredible how each piece of the painting fits to the main theme that they want to express.

I love the Prado in Madrid. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is also great.

If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.

Art is always an exaggeration in some sense; in color, in form, even in theme, etc... but it has always been this way. It is the same with the nature of some works by Giotto or Massacio, or the color of life as expressed by Van Gogh.

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.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls - I had no chance in either - I found my comfort in Jesus.

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

I'm not going for the sixteenth chapel.

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted.

When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.

Americans who visit Tuscany or Umbria love the landscape: the silvery olive groves, the fields of sunflowers, the vineyards, the stone houses and barns.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

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

The Vatican takes your breath away.