Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.

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.

This became Delacroix 's theme: that the achievements of the spirit all that a great library contained were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.