I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.
I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.
Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.
'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.
When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
I am always connected with the Renaissance a lot; that's why I am connected with Pitti Palace.
When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.
One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.
