Italian Artist Quotes

Titian

Amedeo Modigliani

Paolo Veronese

Umberto Boccioni

Giovanni Verga

Giacomo Balla

Gino Severini

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

Giorgio Morandi

Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy.

With one eye you are looking at the outside world, while with the other you are looking within yourself.

Amedeo Modigliani

The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast.... From Géricault and Constantin Guys [both Romantic French painters] to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude towards sport and military life... In Odilon Redon's visionary renderings of horses and later in those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world of dreams and myths.

It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.

Umberto Boccioni

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.

Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image.

Frederick Sommer

The heart gets tired too; and it falls apart bit by bit, like an old cloth wears out in the wash.

I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way.

Artemisia Gentileschi

The most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lies in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draftsmanship.

Cennino Cennini

There comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse.

As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound.

When he mixes a salad, the Devil, I've heard.
Three ingredients uses; first advocates' tongues.
Next notaries' fingers; I'll not name the third.

It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.

In our young days, when Modigliani and I first came to Paris, in 1906, nobody was very clear about ideas. But unconsciously, we knew quite a lot of things, of which we became aware later on.

I paint my pictures with all the considerations which are natural to my intelligence, and according as my intelligence understands them.

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like.

Since it is prohibited by the Church to perform anatomies on the human body, and since it is impossible to know the medical art completely, unless one has knowledge of anatomy... I shall demonstrate patently and openly the anatomy of the human body, through properly executed illustrations.

Guido da Vigevano

Further developing his first synthesis of a speeding automobile, Balla has arrived at the first plastic complex. This has revealed to us an abstract landscape of cones, pyramids, polyhedrons, spirals of mountains, rivers, lights, shadows. In short, there is a deep analogy between the essential force-lines of speed and the essential force-lines of a landscape.