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

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.

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

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

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

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.