Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Can't you see the angel imprisoned in the block of stone trying to get out? I am trying to free him

Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.