Pompeii Quotes
What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found [back] in the museum of Naples – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.
Susan Vreeland
My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. the restlessness of my horse increases with each new work, the rider is always more exhausted, he has lost his domination of the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs resemble those that destroyed sodom and pompeii. I aspire to make visible the last stage of destruction of a myth, of the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, the humanists' man of virtue. my work in the last years doesn't want to be heroic, but tragic.
Marino Marini
But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.
Marino Marini
My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the 'uono di virtù' of the humanists..
Marino Marini
What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples [in 1882] – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot