Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been ve….

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters..

Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats….

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas like….

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty..

Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is th….

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans..

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life..

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon..

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well..

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes..

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well..

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another hu….

We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, u….

The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting obj….

Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they plac….

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite speci….

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos..

The great artist takes what he needs..

The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man a….

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a ….