Leonardo Quotes - page 3
You were asking my opinion on your work of art, my dear Jean [= Duchamp's brother-in-law Jean Crotti, who asked Duchamp his comment on an art-work he made]... Artists throughout the ages are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery pulls some of them through and ruin others... I do not believe in painting per se – A painting is made not by the artist but by those who look at it and grant it their favors. In other words, no painters knows himself or what he is doing – There is no outward sign explaining why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo [da Vinci] are equally 'recognized.
Marcel Duchamp
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?
Jerry Saltz
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.
John F. Kennedy
So back to school he went. To nail down the way his fingers moved, Menuhin learned every scale imaginable. He learned to play them at every speed. He searched the library for books on violin technique. He went to the best teachers and asked them to explain things the books didn't say. He asked gymnasts and dancers for advice on the most precise way to move his bowing arm. To understand how to control his bowing better, he learned the names of each muscle in the back, upper arms, forearms and fingers. He studied drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci, so he'd know what hands looked like on the inside. Then Menuhin broke his performance down even more. Studying India's exercise system of yoga, he started to understand his breathing as he played.
Yehudi Menuhin
Cardano was a man of universal interests, and much of his ability must have been inherited from his father, Fazio Cardano... a lawyer... but also deeply steeped in the medical sciences, mathematics, and all kinds of occult lore... he had... a high reputation as a scholar in his native town; even Leonardo da Vinci notes several times that he consulted Messer Fazio on geometric questions... he was appointed as a public lecturer in geometry.
Gerolamo Cardano
Florentine painting between Giotto and Michelangelo contains the names of such artists as Orcagna, Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Botticelli. ... Forget that they were painters, they remain great sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain architects, poets, and even men of science.
Bernard Berenson
Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt's has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great.
Rembrandt