Alberti Quotes

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

A man can do all things if he but wills them.

When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I've learned to channel my experiences into them. The last two -- distractions and fears -- are the dangerous ones. They're the habitual demons that invade the launch of any project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible. Let me tell you my five big fears: 1. People will laugh at me. 2. Someone has done it before. 3. I have nothing to say. 4. I will upset someone I love. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind. "There are mighty demons, but they're hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they'll shut down my impulses ('No, you can't do that') and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven't yet, and they're not going to start now.... 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. 4. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you're a good person with good intentions. You're trying to create unity, not discord. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, 'Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.' But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.”12 Leonardo mastered all three.

أصغوا إليّ لم أكن أعرف أن الأبواب تغيّر موضعها، و الأرواح بإمكانها أن تخجل من أجسادها، والضوء يحمل الموت في نهاية النفق

Florence had the Alberti fighting for freedom, but never had real Jacobins. It experienced the Viva Maria insurrections, but never really witnessed strong extremist passions. Using the comparison of the colours universally celebrated by Stendhal, we can say that the Florentine red rather resembled a pink and that the black looked more like a grey.

It's better to live with love than die without it.

Haste represented youth's infirmity.

...nothing other than the harmony of the individual limbs and parts, so that nothing can be added or taken away without damaging it.

أحدٌ ما خلفك، وراء ظهركِ أحدٌ يغمضُ عينيك بالكلمات

أيتها الأنوار! أدركيني! فقد انهزمت أنا بلا عنف بالعسل والكلمات

Many of the figures in his preparatory drawings are nude; he had come to believe in Alberti’s advice that an artist should build a picture of a human body from the inside out, first conceiving of the skeleton, then the skin, then the clothing.

A remarkably large number of Renaissance artists were illegitimate, including Alberti and Ghiberti. For them, as for Leonardo, this was both a curse and a blessing. Had he been born "legitimately," Leonardo would likely have followed in his father's footsteps and become a notary or a lawyer. But those professions' guilds refused entry to illegitimate children. Leonardo couldn't become a doctor or a pharmacist, nor could he attend university. By age thirteen, most doors were already closed to him.

NOTICIARIO DE UN COLEGIAL MELANCÓLICO NOMINATIVO: la nieve GENITIVO: de la nieve DATIVO: a o para la nieve ACUSATIVO: a la nieve VOCATIVO: ¡oh la nieve! ABLATIVO: con la nieve de la nieve en la nieve por la nieve sin la nieve sobre la nieve tras la nieve La luna tras la nieve Y estos pronombres personales extraviados por el río y esta conjugación tristísima perdida entre los árboles BUSTER KEATON

Si mi voz muriera en tierra, llevadla al nivel del mar y dejadla en la ribera. Llevadla al nivel del mar y nombradla capitana de un blanco bajel de guerra. ¡Oh my v0z condecorada con la insignia marinera: sobre el corazón un ancla y sobre el ancla una estrella y sobre la estrella el viento y sobre el viento la vela!

No matter how simple the furnishings are, you can always tell a write by his home.

Cuando dos poetas se conocen y se dan la mano por vez primera, es como si dos corrientes trasangélicas tropezaran, fundiéndose.

ancient runic systems and the Irish codes of the Book of Ballymote with their exotic names (‘Serpent through the heather’, ‘Vexation of a poet’s heart’), through the codes of Pope Sylvester II and Hildegard von Bingen, through the invention of Alberti’s cipher disk – the first poly-alphabetic cipher – and Cardinal Richelieu’s grilles, all the way down to the machine-generated mysteries of the German Enigma,

Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.

Alberti in his treatise on painting had advised that lines should be drawn to delineate edges, and Verrocchio did just that. Leonardo took care to observe the real world, and he noticed the opposite: when we look at three-dimensional objects, we don’t see sharp lines. “Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude,” he wrote. “When you paint shadows and their edges, which cannot be perceived except indistinctly, do not make them sharp or clearly defined, otherwise your work will have a wooden appearance.

The programme of the previous year was repeated in 1860. Returning from Rome to Florence at the beginning of June, the Brownings in July went to Siena to avoid the extreme heat of the summer at Florence, staying as before at the Villa Alberti. Their visit to Siena was, however, rather shorter than the previous one, lasting only till September. There is no doubt that Mrs. Browning, during all this time, was losing ground in point of health; and she now received another severe blow in the news of the serious illness of her sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook). The anxiety lasted for several months, and ended with the death of Mrs. Cook in the following winter.

Yo sé que tiene alas. Que por las noches sueña en alta voz la brisa de plata de sus ruedas. Yo sé que tiene alas. Que canta cuando vuela dormida, abriendo al sueño una celeste senda. Yo sé que tiene alas. Que volando me lleva por prados que no acaban y mares que no empiezan. Yo sé que tiene alas. Que el día que ella quiera, los cielos de la ida ya nunca tendrá vuelta.

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everything from math to art. One difference is that Alberti’s illegitimacy did not prevent him from being given a classical education. His father helped him get a dispensation from the Church laws barring illegitimate children from taking holy orders or holding ecclesiastical offices, and he studied law at Bologna, was ordained as a priest, and became a writer for the pope. During his early thirties, Alberti wrote his masterpiece analyzing painting and perspective, On Painting, the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi. Alberti had an engineer’s instinct for collaboration and, like Leonardo, was “a lover of friendship” and “open-hearted,” according to the scholar Anthony Grafton. He also honed the skills of courtiership. Interested in every art and technology, he would grill people from all walks of life, from cobblers to university scholars, to learn their secrets. In other words, he was much like Leonardo, except in one respect: Leonardo was not strongly motivated by the goal of furthering human knowledge by openly disseminating and publishing his findings; Alberti, on the other hand, was dedicated to sharing his work, gathering a community of intellectual colleagues who could build on each other’s discoveries, and promoting open discussion and publication as a way to advance the accumulation of learning. A maestro of collaborative practices, he believed, according to Grafton, in “discourse in the public sphere.” When Leonardo was a teenager in Florence, Alberti was in his sixties and spending much of his time in Rome, so it is unlikely they spent time together. Alberti was a major influence nonetheless.

Ven, mi amor, en la tarde del Aniene y siéntate conmigo a ver viento. Aunque no estés, mi solo pensamiento es ver contigo el viento que va y viene. Tú no te vas, porque mi amor te tiene. Yo no me iré, pues junto a ti me siento más vida de tu sangre, más tu aliento, más luz del corazón que me sostiene Tú no te irás, mi amor, aunque lo quieras. Tú no te irás, mi amor, y si te fueras, Aun yéndote, mi amor, jamás te irías. Es tuya mi canción, en ella estoy. Y en ese viento que va y viene voy. Y en ese viento siempre, me verías.

La espera mereció la pena. El resultado constituye la pintura narrativa más fascinante de la historia, que, además, presenta múltiples elementos del genio de Leonardo. Su genial composición muestra su dominio de las complejas reglas de la perspectiva natural y artificial, pero también su flexibilidad a la hora de alterarlas cuando fuera necesario. Su destreza para plasmar el movimiento resulta evidente en los gestos de cada uno de los apóstoles, al igual que su famosa habilidad para acatar el mandato de Alberti de revelar los movimientos del alma, las emociones, mediante los del cuerpo. Del mismo modo que recurría al sfumato para difuminar los contornos de los objetos, Leonardo desdibujó la exactitud de la perspectiva y del tiempo. Al plasmar el movimiento y las emociones en sucesivas oleadas, Leonardo no solo consiguió capturar un momento, sino además escenificar un drama, como si estuviera coreografiando una representación teatral. La puesta en escena artificial de la Última cena, los movimientos exagerados, los trucos de perspectiva y la teatralidad de los gestos con las manos demuestran la influencia del trabajo de Leonardo como empresario teatral y como productor de espectáculos de la corte.

The social function of court life is to enlist the support and adherence of the public for the ruling house. The Renaissance princes want to delude not only the people, they also want to make an impression o the nobility and bind it to the court. But they are not dependent on either its services or its company; they can use anyone, of whatever descent, provided he is useful. Consequently, the Italian courts of Renaissance differ from the medieval courts in their very constitution; they accept into their circle upstart adventurers and merchants who have made money, plebeian humanists and ill-bred artists - entirely as if they had all the traditional social qualifications. In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry, a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles, such as described in the Decamerone and in the Paradiso degli Alberti, and represents, on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

tendrían un 99% de posibilidades de anular todas sus facultades, pero a él le preocupaba el otro 1%,

«Signor Berteli! Vorrei sapere ancora una cosa da lei. Che opinione ha di noi anziani?» Tom impallidì. Poi si passo una mano tra i capelli e si rivolse alla platea disordinata che attendeva speranzosa un suo verdetto: «Cara signora, voi siete quello che sarò io. E quello che io sono, è ciò che voi eravate. Per tanto, chi meglio di lei potrebbe rispondere alla sua domanda?»

Le più grandi scoperte del mondo sono state fatte da uomini che viaggiavano con il vento a favore e non contrario...

The material culture of solitude, on the other hand, is easy to uncover; a single toothbrush in a bathroom; a single fork in a kitchen; a single pair of shoes placed neatly in the hall—the objects of singledom are not the same as objects of loneliness, bringing us back to the difference between being alone and feeling alone.

Some emotional traces are more recoverable than others; a plaintive love letter lasts longer than a handkerchief wet with tears

Online community, between people who have usually never met and share only select aspects of their lives, presumes inclusion and belonging through communicational modes that borrow from successful real-life intimacy. It prioritizes openness and transparency, encourages emotional response (albeit in a limited way through, for example, Facebook’s ever-powerful ‘like’ button), and claims to promote consensus. This rhetoric of openness and sharing—a presumption of egalitarian transparency—is inherent in the corporate mantra of Google (‘Do no evil’), Facebook (‘making the Web more social’), and Flickr-Yahoo (‘Share your pictures, watch the world’). Yet just as inner-city windows might present an illusion of togetherness in which isolation is actually the norm, this presumed openness of virtual communities hides the fact that inclusion in social media can be fickle and conditional; digital citizenship hides multiple power dynamics and relations,not all of which are explicitly stated. Whereas there has been some discussion of the meanings of digital citizenship (to mean the accepted norms of appropriate, responsible technology use), online ‘community’ is invoked as a given. The Professor of Media Studies at Utrecht University, José van Dijck, refers in her discussion of social media’s history to ‘community function’ and ‘community character’; ‘community collectivism’ and ‘community utilization’; and to ‘community’ itself as being innovative, organizational, self-selecting, and open. But community, like citizenship, carries an enormous functional, symbolic, and practical weight. What kinds of ‘community’ are being forged online, and how do they impact on self-esteem, a sense of belonging, and self-identity? How does online community differ from offline community, and how and why does loneliness result?

Las palabras abren puertas sobre el mar.

Cuide para não se deixar vencer pelo frenesi de construir a qualquer custo, e para não iniciar sua obra (...) como fazem os loucos ou os imprudentes.

Hace falta estar ciego, tener como metidas en los ojos raspaduras de vidrio, cal viva, arena hirviendo, para no ver la luz que salta en nuestros actos, que ilumina por dentro nuestra lengua, nuestra diaria palabra. Hace falta querer morir sin estela de gloria y alegría, sin participación de los himnos futuros, sin recuerdo en los hombres que juzguen el pasado, sombrío de la Tierra. Hace falta querer ya en vida ser pasado, obstáculo sangriento, cosa muerta, seco olvido.

A la Virgen María: Que eres mi timonel, que eres la guía de mi oculta sirena cantadora, escrito está en la frente de la proa de mi navío, al Sol del mediodía

Si mi voz muriera en tierra llevadla al nivel del mar y dejadla en la ribera. Llevadla al nivel del mar y nombradla capitana de un blanco bajel de guerra. Oh mi voz condecorada con la insignia marinera: sobre el corazón un ancla y sobre el ancla una estrella y sobre la estrella el viento y sobre el viento una vela!

No obstante, no me dolerá si llego a alcanzar lo que me había propuesto, a saber, que quienes me leyeren piensen que, al hablar, he preferido ser asequible a parecer elocuente.

In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his De re aedificatoria (On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

—No tengo ni idea —respondió Lourdes

—No tengo ni idea —respondió Lourdes intrigada.

—A cualquiera que le vinieras con ese cuento te tacharía de loca,

Las leyes universales pueden ser soslayadas parcialmente pero nunca pueden ser transgredidas, pues entonces sólo existiría el caos, y en el caos la vida no puede prosperar.

una gran cantidad de personas viven el AMOR como una obligación para con alguien, y sin embargo el AMOR es todo lo contrario.

sólo cuando se nos presentan las verdaderas dificultades llegamos a ser conscientes de nuestro verdadero potencial.

Un día se presentó con un grupo de lo que él decía se llamaban turistas, algo así como gente cansada de estar en sus casas que pensaban que lo que les faltaba lo iban a encontrar en las casas de otros.

Te aseguro amigo mío que a este respecto quien diga lo contrario miente como un bellaco, pues la desgracia ajena es siempre un consuelo de lo más conveniente, ya que sin ella no podríamos saber lo verdaderamente afortunados que somos. ¿No lo crees tú así?

Mother nature is a bitch, she hides her weaknesses and makes them look like her strengths.

Friendship is balancing out each other's insanity, or tipping the scale together.

No es que la mierda no se encuentre ya allí desde el principio, sino que de alguna manera sólo adquiere la forma de mierda cuando ya es demasiado tarde para reaccionar.

No le parecía bien que sólo por estar en posesión de un carácter a veces indomable, como por otra parte le ocurría ahora mismo a ese cielo que vomitaba furia y al que nadie juzgaba, hubiera dejado de ser merecedor del amor de los suyos, como así había ocurrido.

los relámpagos iluminaban el cielo con tal intensidad que daba la impresión de que el sol había estallado en mil pedazos,

Como tú bien has dicho el amor verdadero es algo muy poderoso. Esto es así única y exclusivamente porque tiene la facultad de vivir sólo en el Presente. En el momento en que se apoya en el pasado o que depende de las expectativas del futuro el AMOR deja de existir y se transforma en una sombra de Él mismo.

Superioritatea nu înseamnă să treci totul cu vederea, ci să găsești o formă prin care să-l umilești și prin care să te eliberezi pe tine însăți.

Sixtina Tú mi vida, esta noche me has borrado del corazón y hasta del pensamiento, y tal vez, sin saberlo, me has negado dándome por perdido ya en el viento. Más luego, vida, vi cómo llorabas, entre mis brazos y que me besabas.

¡Sal, hortelana, del mar, flotando, sobre tu huerto, desnuda, para llorar por el marinero muerto! Llueve sobre el agua, llueve nieve negra de alga fría. Entre glaciares de nieve, abierta, la tumba mía. ¡Funerales de las olas! ¡El viento, en los arenales! Entre apagadas farolas se hunden mis funerales.

«Tú no te irás, mi amor, aunque lo quieras. Tú no te irás, mi amor, y si te fueras, aun yéndote, mi amor, jamás te irías…» —Rafael Alberti

Bridalveil Fall. It was an easy 0.5 mile round trip

la felicidad de una sardina no depende tanto del estado civil como algunas se piensan.

Yosemite Falls, the highest waterfall in North America, dropping 2,425 feet from the top. This

In practice, the wet nurses did not have to be free women or of Christian upbringing; it was enough if they were fair-skinned, like the slaves from the east. 15 The idea that it could be otherwise, that breastfeeding was close to a mother’s heart and important for the child’s development, was professed by Renaissance philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti, and later Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel de Montaigne, who were looking back to Plutarch and other writers from classical antiquity.

The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self.

Wittkower's response - which resonated for decades - to the manifest lack of robustness of modern civilization was to reassert the absolute difference between the past and the present: premodern societies were oriented, and they knew hierarchy. Wittkower argued, on the basis of the texts by Alberti and Palladio, that the architecture of the Italian Renaissance materialized a mathematical program: a system of ratios that pictured the invisible structure of the cosmos. Architecture placed the human body within this system. It is hard to see the difference between this and Sedlmayr's view except that the one believes that man's image was best framed by forms based on the divinely measured proportions of the human body, and the other believes that man's image was best framed by an image of divinity itself. Wittkower recovers a religious conception of architecture but detached from Christianity: the Renaissance church as a Hindu temple, as it were.

Llegaron juristas como Luis Jiménez de Asúa; historiadores como Claudio Sánchez Albornoz; pedagogos como Lorenzo Luzuriaga; sociólogos como Francisco Ayala; escritores como Rafael Alberti, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Arturo Serrano Plaja, Rosa Chacel o Ricardo Baeza; músicos como Manuel de Falla; dramaturgos como Jacinto Grau y Alejandro Casona; artistas plásticos como Luis Seoane, Manuel Colmeiro y Alfonso Castelao, y numerosos actores y periodistas.

In the decades that followed, a succession of schools—Impressionism, Post-Impression, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism—developed theories as far removed from Manet as Manet had been from Alberti. The idea of the artist as a Bohemian outsider came out of this revolution, as did the contempt that artists would develop for the public, an obsession with self-expression and iconoclasm, and the rejection of classical standards of beauty as an objective of art. Abstraction is a meta-invention that has much to answer for. But in its first flush and at its best, it produced works from 1850 to our cutoff point of 1950 that have so far survived the test of time as judged by the opinions of experts, prices in the auction room, and popularity in the museums. The

doctor anónimo

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods