Renaissance Famous Quotes

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon. That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon. - So it is. - I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions. - All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it? - It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean. - Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture. - Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.

Then, four years later, Du Bois, with white neo-abolitionist allies, launched the NAACP, recognizing that cultural constructions not built on or allied with political agency were destined to remain exactly what they’d started as: empty signifiers. In fact, Du Bois—though a participant himself—critiqued the premise of Locke’s New Negro Renaissance in a famous speech he delivered at the NAACP’s annual conference in 1926.10

From my friend Oleksandr, a.k.a. Z --I loved this IMMEDIATELY There is a famous speech from film noir The Third Man: After all, it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Varanasi is the holiest city in Hinduism in India, which is a very unique city in india. The land of Varanasi (Kashi) has been the ultimate pilgrimage spot for Hindus for ages. Often referred to as Benares, Varanasi is the oldest living city in the world. Ganges in Varanasi is believed to have the power to wash away the sins of mortals. Ganges is said to have its origins in the tresses of Lord Shiva and in Varanasi, it expands to the mighty river that we know of. The city is a center of learning and civilization for over 3000 years. With Sarnath, the place where Buddha preached his first sermon after enlightenment, just 10 km away, Varanasi has been a symbol of Hindu renaissance. Knowledge, philosophy, culture, devotion to Gods, Indian arts and crafts have all flourished here for centuries. The holy city has many other temples also. The Tulsi Manas mandir is a modern marble temple. The walls of the temple are engraved with verses and scenes from Ramcharitmanas, hindi version of Ramayana, written by Tulsidas ji who lived here. Varanasi has produced numerous famous scholars and intellectuals, who have left their mark in respective fields of activity. Varanasi is home to numerous universities, college, schools, Madarsas and Pathshalas and the Guru Shishya tradition still continue in many institutions. The literary tradition of languages, dialects, newspapers, magazines and libraries continue to even this day. In varanasi one must have to do Boat Ride.

According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

The Historical Setting of Genesis Mesopotamia: Sumer Through Old Babylonia Sumerians. It is not possible at this time to put Ge 1–11 into a specific place in the historical record. Our history of the ancient Near East begins in earnest after writing has been invented, and the earliest civilization known to us in the historical record is that of the Sumerians. This culture dominated southern Mesopotamia for over 500 years during the first half of the third millennium BC (2900–2350 BC), known as the Early Dynastic Period. The Sumerians have become known through the excavation of several of their principal cities, which include Eridu, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are credited with many of the important developments in civilization, including the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. Urbanization is also first witnessed among the Sumerians. By the time of Abraham, the Sumerians no longer dominate the ancient Near East politically, but their culture continues to influence the region. Other cultures replace them in the political arena but benefit from the advances they made. Dynasty of Akkad. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century BC, the Sumerian culture was overrun by the formation of an empire under the kingship of Sargon I, who established his capital at Akkad. He ruled all of southern Mesopotamia and ranged eastward into Elam and northwest to the Mediterranean on campaigns of a military and economic nature. The empire lasted for almost 150 years before being apparently overthrown by the Gutians (a barbaric people from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris), though other factors, including internal dissent, may have contributed to the downfall. Ur III. Of the next century little is known as more than 20 Gutian kings succeeded one another. Just before 2100 BC, the city of Ur took control of southern Mesopotamia under the kingship of Ur-Nammu, and for the next century there was a Sumerian renaissance in what has been called the Ur III period. It is difficult to ascertain the limits of territorial control of the Ur III kings, though the territory does not seem to have been as extensive as that of the dynasty of Akkad. Under Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi, the region enjoyed almost a half century of peace. Decline and fall came late in the twenty-first century BC through the infiltration of the Amorites and the increased aggression of the Elamites to the east. The Elamites finally overthrew the city. It is against this backdrop of history that the OT patriarchs emerge. Some have pictured Abraham as leaving the sophisticated Ur that was the center of the powerful Ur III period to settle in the unknown wilderness of Canaan, but that involves both chronological and geographic speculation. By the highest chronology (i.e., the earliest dates attributed to him), Abraham probably would have traveled from Ur to Harran during the reign of Ur-Nammu, but many scholars are inclined to place Abraham in the later Isin-Larsa period or even the Old Babylonian period. From a geographic standpoint it is difficult to be sure that the Ur mentioned in the Bible is the famous city in southern Mesopotamia (see note on 11:28). All this makes it impossible to give a precise background of Abraham. The Ur III period ended in southern Mesopotamia as the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, lost the support of one city after another and was finally overthrown by the Elamites, who lived just east of the Tigris. In the ensuing two centuries (c. 2000–1800 BC), power was again returned to city-states that controlled more local areas. Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Lagash, Mari, Assur and Babylon all served as major political centers.

Lorenzino's Apology for the murder made him famous, a celebrity killer of the Renaissance. Queen Marguerite of Navarre wrote a story about Alessandro's assassination. Versions of the tale featured on the London stage. It let itself to the genre of Jacobean revenge drama.

This “miraculous man”—Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg—was nearing sixty years of age. He had been born in Mainz, a town on the banks of the Rhine River with a population of six thousand, sometime in the mid- to late 1390s. Little is known about his early life, or, for that matter, about his middle or later years either. He moved 110 miles upstream along the Rhine to Strasbourg sometime around the late 1420s, probably as an exile following municipal disorders in Mainz that pitted the middle-class guildsmen against the upper class, to which Gutenberg’s family belonged. A good deal of what is known about him comes from his various legal scrapes. In the first of these, in 1437, he was sued for a breach of his promise to marry a woman named Ennelin zu der Yserin Tür (Ennelin of the Iron Gate); he was also sued for defamation by one of her witnesses, a shoemaker whom Gutenberg called “a miserable wretch who lived by lying and cheating.” Gutenberg was forced to pay the shoemaker compensation for the slander but appears to have avoided marriage to Ennelin.4 By this time he was a member of Strasbourg’s guild of goldsmiths, supporting himself by polishing gemstones and, together with a partner named Hans Riffe, manufacturing pilgrims’ mirrors in anticipation of the crowds coming to view the famous and sacred relics exposed every seven years at Aachen, such as the swaddling clothes of Jesus and the robe of the Virgin. These mirrors were used by pilgrims according to the religious practice of the day, capturing and “retaining” the divine reflection of these holy relics, after which they were proudly worn on the return journey as badges. The “miraculous man,” Johannes Gutenberg.

Double-entry accounting was popularized in Europe toward the end of the fifteenth century, and most scholars believe it set the table for the flowering of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern capitalism. What is far less well understood is the why. Why was something as dull as bookkeeping so integral to a complete cultural revolution in Europe? Over nearly seven centuries, “the books” have become something that, in our collective minds, we equate with truth itself—even if only subconsciously. When we doubt a candidate’s claims of wealth, we want to go to his bank records—his personal balance sheet. When a company wants to tap the public markets for capital, they have to open their books to prospective investors. To remain in the market, they need accountants to verify those books regularly. Well-maintained and clear accounting is sacrosanct. The ascendance of bookkeeping to a level equal to truth itself happened over many centuries, and began with the outright hostility European Christendom had to lending before double-entry booking came along. The ancients were pretty comfortable with debt. The Babylonians set the tone in the famous Code of Hammurabi, which offered rules for handling loans, debts, and repayments. The Judeo-Christian tradition, though, had a real ax to grind against the business of lending. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” Deuteronomy 23:19–20 declares. “In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God,” Ezekiel 22:12 states. As Christianity flourished, this deep anti-usury culture continued for more than a thousand years, a stance that coincided with the Dark Ages, when Europe, having lost the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, also lost nearly all comprehension of math. The only people who really needed the science of numbers were monks trying to figure out the correct dates for Easter.

It’s the Parthenon!” said the Dean. “Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!” The ruler struck the glass over the picture. “Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

He has a grand plan to become a famous teacher and infect future generations of educators and students with his philosophy, which will lead to a joyous education renaissance, flying unicorns, and rock and roll for all.

In many respects, the skill set of an artist is similar to that of a programmer. Michelangelo was the archetypal renaissance man: a painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Perhaps he would have made an incredible programmer. When asked about how he created one of his most famous works, the statue of David, he said: I looked into the stone and saw him there, and just chipped away everything else. Is that what you do? Do you reduce and remove the complexities of the problem space, chipping them all away until you reach the beautiful code you were aiming for?

The most famous improvised lines in the history of the movies are the ones Orson Welles came up with while playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949): “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I think you're talking nonsense," said Cornelia, flushing. "I attend lectures every winter in Greek Art and the Renaissance, and I went to some on famous Women of History." Mr. Ferguson groaned in agony: "Greek Art; Renaissance! Famous Women of History! It makes me quite sick to hear you. It's the future that matters, woman, not the past.

Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. “What legend is more beautiful,” he writes, “than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity…However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism.” And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.” His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century – anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History fo the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history.What Michelet admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.

The natural world we perceive through our senses is, for Plato, a defective and incomplete version of this more perfect and timeless realm in the same way that (in the famous metaphor from Book 7 of The Republic) the images seen by the prisoners shackled in their cave are the shadows of the real objects for which the prisoners, in their ignorance, mistake them.

Vespasiano’s biographies were crucial, therefore, to the formation of one of history’s most famous and endearing (if sometimes misleading) narratives: how the rediscovery of ancient books refreshed and “rebirthed” a disoriented and moribund civilization.

The billows and swells of the Platonic revival generated in Florence soon became a deluge that washed across the European intellectual landscape. Plato would so dominate the Western philosophical tradition for the next half-millennium that in 1927 the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead could famously declare in a lecture in Edinburgh: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Lesser is back in New York. He’d been in Paris for two months working as a gofer for the film director Maurice Barraque. To Lesser and his fellow Francophile cineastes, every one of Barraque’s films is a revelation. Beginning in the late sixties Barraque had directed and starred in his own films, all made for nothing, in circumstances that were as haphazard as they were abject. His best works were bolts of genius quickly written, hastily shot and never revised. He was a beautiful drug addict, a poet and painter of light and sound. Onscreen, he was as luminous a presence as the great beauties of European cinema who played opposite him. They worked for nothing, they expected nothing - half of his films were never finished. It was a career famous for disappointment and disaster: Cinema is haunted. We do not watch it, it watches us. But suddenly, late in life he’d had an improbable, unexpected renaissance and began churning out, year after year, small-scale diary-like films. He became almost respectable. All he required was a 16-mm camera, a handful of actors, a few rooms for them to move about in. And, of course, the streets of Paris.

work contained biographies of famous men (and one woman) from the fifteenth century: everyone from popes, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops to assorted scholars and writers, including Niccoli and Poggio. What these illustrious figures had in common was that Vespasiano knew them all.

André de Montbard, the uncle of the famous Cistercian order intellectual and the Templar’s main propagandist, Bernard of Clairvaux. Montbard was also a

Whether the real setting and dating of the Hermetic tradition in late antiquity are, in fact, irrelevant to its reception in the Renaissance is an interesting hermeneutic question that cannot be answered here. In any case and for many other reasons, Yates’s views on the Hermetica became famous for some, notorious for others, especially when, in a 1968 article, she made Hermes a major figure in the preliminaries to the scientific revolution, just two years after J.E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi had connected Newton’s physics with the ancient theology theme so closely associated with Hermes.

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.

Did the girls know, the guide asked, that the Mona Lisa was a real woman, one who had lived and breathed and smiled at Leonardo da Vinci himself? That Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, would become an icon, an embodiment of ideal beauty, a symbol of the Italian Renaissance itself? That the man who painted her would become one of the most famous names in history? That the painter captured not just a woman sitting, hands quietly folded, but an entire era in one portrait?