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, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.

Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

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

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.

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.

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 the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.

Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.