Piero Della Francesca Quotes

There is not much talk about the clouds that are visible up here. No one seems to think it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we are flying past a vast white candy-floss island that would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that if we look out the window, we will see that we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.

The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.

Ah! Books don't come all that often, at least not my way. Andre Malraux's The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and i had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table to proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my next-desk neighbour over the back and say, 'There you are; just get hold of that!' Once I nearly did but just in time I noticed he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! Moments too!

Mano mėgiamiausi poetai? Karalius Dovydas, Karalius Saliamonas, Ekleziastas; Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Valéry, Marie Noël, Jouve; Angelus Silesius, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Traki, Langgasser; Leopardi, Campana, Montale; San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats; Donelaitis, Maironis, Putinas, Aistis (pirmos 4 knygos). Bet mano preferencijos nuolat kinta Mano mėgiamiausi tapytojai? Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Tiziano, Piero di Cosimo, Magnasco; Claude Lorrain, Georges de la Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Manet, Renoir, Soutine, Duffy, Chagall, Sérafine; Brueghel (Senasis), Memling, Hobbema, Vermeer; Dürer, Lucas Cranach (Senasis), Kokoschka; Gainsborough, Palmer; El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Dali; Galdikas, Samuolis, Vizgirda, Valeška, Gudaitis.

Of the Seven Joys, the scene that most interested the painters of the Italian Renaissance was the Annunciation: the moment in which the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she is, miraculously, with child. All of the era’s masters tackled this subject, and exquisitely so. Fra Angelico (ca. 1440), Filippo Lippi (ca. 1455), Piero della Francesca (ca. 1455), Leonardo da Vinci (ca. 1473), Botticelli (1489), Raphael (1503), etc. But what is most interesting, and perhaps most revealing, about the masters’ interest in the Annunciation, is that they all chose to paint it with the same composition. While, in theory, the scene could be imagined in a thousand different ways, for the Italian masters Mary was always on the right side of the painting and the Archangel always on the left; Mary was generally seated with a book at hand, and the winged Gabriel kneeling with a lily; Mary was always in a quasi-interior (such as under a portico or in a room that opened on a garden) while Gabriel was either outside the interior space or in front of a window—such that the countryside could be seen in the distance over his shoulder.

She could not therefore accompany Clive on his day visit to Arezzo and was stung with envy on hearing his account of Piero della Francesca’s frescos based on the story of the True Cross. She greatly admired this artist and catches an echo

274 My father is just like Piero della Francesca’s father: metaphorical.

The rhythm of Tuscan dining may throw us off but after a long lunch outside, one concept is clear—siesta. The logic of a three-hour fall through the crack of the day makes perfect sense. Best to pick up that Piero della Francesca book, wander upstairs and give in to it.

After sixty years of living on terms of intimacy with every kind of work of art, from every clime and every period, I am tempted to conclude that in the long run the most satisfactory creations are those which, like Piero's and Cézanne's, remain ineloquent, mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look and gesture. If they express anything it is character, essence, rather than momentary feeling or purpose. They manifest potentiality rather than activity. It is enough that they exist in themselves.