Quotes about Michelangelo

63 Sourced Quotes

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Chuck Palahniuk

If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue.... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

My work may be balanced on the second side [the Romantic tendency]....- but I believe it has some elements of order & unity, some design, even balance & abstract qualities, some tenseness. When its all classical, its too obvious & cold & deadly perfect - when its all romantic, its too loose uncontrolled wildly chaotic & shapeless – But in my opinion – Gothic sculpture – Mexican, all primitive sculpture, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Michelangelo, Masaccio, are all more romantic than classic [Moore is reacting here on Stanley Casson's critic in 'The Listener' 25 Aug. 1937

You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.

The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented Michelangelo's style before Michelangelo.

Aristide Maillol

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City – the intuition that I had been there already.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man's Cellini or a road company Cosimo de' Medici... the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist.

The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

By this time trapped inside the drug's reverie I could have sprayed out Michelangelo's Last Judgement on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A yacht would be a beggar's handcart by comparison.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The particular does not interest me; I find meaning only in a general idea. In Michelangelo one is carried away by the idea of power, the whole single-minded concept he imposed on himself. The 'Slaves' and the 'Medici tombs' are sculpture made to be seen only from one side. For me, sculpture means the block; my figure of 'France' has more than twenty different sides. When I enlarged it only four were left, and I had to rework it..

Aristide Maillol

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

Nothing moves young people so much as to witness a sublime and virile gloom. Michelangelo's thinker staring down into the abyss of his own thoughts, Beethoven's poignantly drawn lips; these tragical masks of universal suffering touch the crude emotions of youth far more than Mozart's silver melodies or the crystalline light that radiates from Leonardo's figures. Being itself beauty, youth has no need of transfiguration. In the superabundance of its vital forces, it is allured by the tragical, and in its inexperience, is prone to accept the embraces of melancholy. That, too, is why youth is always ready for danger, and ever willing to extend a brotherly hand towards mental pain.

In 1964 I was at school, planning to study economics and sociology, when curiosity took me to the Tate Gallery to see an international survey exhibition of contemporary art. It brought together the painting and sculpture of the previous decade, beginning with the late works of the modern masters, Matisse and Picasso, and concluding with the twenty-seven year olds Allen Jones and David Hockney. I was bowled over. Suddenly, art was not just Turner and Constable, or Leonardo and Michelangelo, but objects of considerable size and brilliant colour, dealing with the sensations, subjects and issues of the Sixties.

Nicholas Serota

Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.

We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Stephen Greenblatt

There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most – men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort... Great Art is not Perfect. Here the disturbing element comes in. It is instructive to know that Rembrandt copied Mantegna, whose art is the extreme opposite of his own. Why did he do so? Because he was conscious that his own art lacked the classical element. He was aware of the opposite, and that makes him greater.

There is a dreadful discrepancy between Michelangelo's works and the words put into the mouth of Charlton Heston, who represents him here, and this picture — which is mostly about a prolonged wrangle between the sculptor and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who keeps sweeping into the Sistine Chapel and barking, "When will you make an end of it?" — isn't believable for an instant.

You are the masterpiece of your own life. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpturing is you (Dr. Joe Vitale)

The beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cinquecento, is the most famous period of Italian art, one of the greatest periods of all time. This was the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, of Raphael and Titian, of Correggio and Giorgione, of Dürer and Holbein in the north, and of many other famous masters. One may well ask why it was that all these great masters were born in the same period, but such questions are more easily asked than answered. One cannot explain the existence of genius. It is better to enjoy it.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

There was no telling who this head, or this leg, or that arm, belonged to... So I scattered the limbs in my painting and realized that in this way I was getting much closer to the truth than Michelangelo did when he concentrated on every separate muscle.

Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.

I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.

This science gave me a taste for the arts. It is Number that gives value to sounds and silences, lights and shadows, forms and spaces. Michelangelo and Bach seemed to me like divine mathematicians [calculateurs]. Already I felt that only mathematics enables works that can last. Whether as a result of patient study, or of a stormy [fulgurante] intuition, number alone can reduce all our diversities of feeling to the strict unity of a mass, a fresco, or a sculpted head.

Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry book-keeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

Herbert J. Muller

That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said.

Being in bed with Jim [Morrison] was like being in bed with Michelangelo's David, only with blue eyes.