Renaissance Painting Quotes

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

Destroying forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.

she's like a Renaissance painting

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

The Death of Allegory I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

In other words, Botticelli's ideal women look like women and not boys. They're soft and curvaceous. Healthy and rounded. Women of the size figured in this painting were considered beautiful for centuries, if not millennia. They were the aesthetic ideal during my lifetime and long after." He brought his mouth to her neck before whispering, "My ideal hasn't changed.

The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare’s day.

It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening- of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes, and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

Want to guess what comes up when I Google “Woman discovers”? It’s not “new galaxy.” It’s “a body in her trunk” or "the unthinkable in her attic.” According to my computer search, other big discoveries by women include “her co-worker is her birth mom,” “a Renaissance painting in her kitchen,” and “her new home was once a meth lab.” Hey, at least that one contains the word “lab.

Except Caitlyn. High school dating, drill team, school spirit—it all seemed silly to her. Why did it feel like high school was crushing her soul? She had nothing concrete she could point to. All she knew was that she didn’t belong here. She preferred old, used clothes to new ones; her iPod was full of classical music; and photos of castles and reproductions of old European art covered her bedroom walls, including a Renaissance painting of a young girl in white, named Bia. It should have been pop singers on her wall, or movie stars

As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.

In Renaissance painting every point in space is accounted for. Here is a point, Anna, discoursing with the phenomenologist from Wiesbaden and raising her eyes to heaven. Standing just outside their line of vision, I slide my eye to the left. Postmetaphysical myself, I will be unaccountable for the murder.

And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.

I touch my face and my fingers come away streaked with paint, smeared with pain and degradation.

Leonard da Vinci had painted the Mona Lisa. But Vincenzo Perugia had turned it into The Mona Lisa.

...the pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.

The ancient Greeks enjoyed colors and it is assumed that they painted their statues. One can still see today small deposits of colors in classical statues. More than a thousand years later the Renaissance sculptors copied the ancient statues, leaving off the colors. I find that symbolic and telling; what else have we copied from the past, leaving off the colors, nuances, or even the essential meanings?

Raphael, Saint George and the Dragon, 1504-06 It’s hard to talk about what you believe while you are believing it. Fervor reduces thought to shorthand and all we get is an icon. Give a man a weapon and you have a warrior. Put him on a horse and you have a hero. The weapon is a tool. The horse is a metaphor. Raphael painted this twice—white horse facing east against the greens, white horse facing west against the yellows. The maiden flees or prays, depending. A basic dragon, the kind you’d expect from the Renaissance. Evidence of evil but not proof. There’s a companion piece as well: Saint Michael. Paint angels, it’s easier: you don’t need the horse. Michael stands on Satan’s throat, vanquishing, while everything brown burns red. All these things happened. Allegedly. When you paint an evil thing, do you invoke it or take away its power? This has nothing to do with faith but is still a good question. Raphael was trying to say something about spirituality. This could be the definition of painting. The best part of spirituality is reverence. There are other parts. Some people like to hear the sound of their own voice. If you don’t believe in the world it would be stupid to paint it. If you don’t believe in God, who are you talking to?

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak.

The formidable combined forces of Judeo-Christianity and modern science have never succeeded in wiping out pagan astrology, nor will they ever. Astrology supplies what is missing in the west's official moral and intellectual codes. Astrology is the oldest organised art form of sexual personae. Waging war on astrology, the medieval and Renaissance Church promulgated the distortion that astrology is fatalism, a flouting of God's Providence and the necessity for moral struggle. But the predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology, which three thousand years of continuous practise have given a phenomenal subtlety. Astrology does insist on self-discipline and self-transformation. Judging astrology by those vague sun-sign columns in the daily paper is like judging Christianity by a smudged shop window of black-velvet day-glo paintings of the Good Shepherd.

But above all things was it a return to Nature - that formula which seems to suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine things as they really happened.

There are, broadly speaking, three directly analogous progressions inthe history of art: in Antiquity, from the blockiness of Egyptian art to the loose, painterly handling of Roman landscape frescoes; in the Middle Ages, from the tectonic emphasis of Ottonian art to the flamboyance of late Gothic; and in later times, from early Renaissance linearity to the sparkling web of light spun by the Rococo. The wheel turns full circle, but more rapidly each time.

Art in sixteenth-century Florence was not a “soft” activity compared with the real world where “hard” reality prevailed. Images were powerful. Paintings and statues in churches could possess miraculous powers or manifest protective saints.

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.

Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself.

Now give me some advice about how to take full advantage of this city. I’m always looking to improve my odds.” “Just what I’d expect from a horny actuary.” “I’m serious.” Carlos reflected for a moment on the problem at hand. He actually had never needed or tried to take full advantage of the city in order to meet women, but he thought about all of his friends who regularly did. His face lit up as he thought of some helpful advice: “Get into the arts.” “The arts?” “Yeah.” “But I’m not artistic.” “It doesn’t matter. Many women are into the arts. Theater. Painting. Dance. They love that stuff.” “You want me to get into dance? Earthquakes have better rhythm than me…And can you really picture me in those tights?” “Take an art history class. Learn photography. Get involved in a play or an independent film production. Get artsy, Sammy. I’m telling you, the senoritas dig that stuff.” “Really?” “Yeah. You need to sign up for a bunch of artistic activities. But you can’t let on that it’s all just a pretext to meet women. You have to take a real interest in the subject or they’ll quickly sniff out your game.” “I don’t know…It’s all so foreign to me…I don’t know the first thing about being artistic.” “Heeb, this is the time to expand your horizons. And you’re in the perfect city to do it. New York is all about reinventing yourself. Get out of your comfort zones. Become more of a Renaissance man. That’s much more interesting to women.

LEBEAU: Well I’m not a philosopher, but I know my mother, and that’s why I’m here. You’re like people who look at my paintings—“What does this mean, what does that mean?” Look at it, don’t ask what it means; you’re not God, you can’t tell what anything means. I’m walking down the street before, a car pulls up beside me, a man gets out and measures my nose, my ears, my mouth, the next thing I’m sitting in a police station—or whatever the hell this is here—and in the middle of Europe, the highest peak of civilization! And you know what it means? After the Romans and the Greeks and the Renaissance, and you know what this means?

Michelangelo had only this to say: “I have finished the chapel I have been painting: the Pope is very well satisfied,” he wrote his father. Then he added: “Other things have not turned out for me as I’d hoped. For this I blame the times, which are very unfavorable to our art.” Today, we call those “unfavorable” times the High Renaissance.

Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don't mean just those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History, I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority. This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the nature versus nurture debate, to mistakes in using evidence in the court of law, to illusions about the "logic" of history--and of course, most severely, in our perception of the nature of extreme events.

To really understand it, you'll need to know a lot," he said. "To understand the stories of the Prophets in it, you need to know your Bible stories." I gulped. My knowledge of the Bible was cobbled together from Renaissance paintings and reading Paradise Lost in sophomore English. To understand the text, you need to understand the context, the Sheikh continued. To make sense of the rules it sets down, you need to understand Arab society during the age it was revealed: "So if you don't know the customs and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad's time, you can't make sense of it." My background in seventh-century Arabia was rudimentary, and my Arabic nonexistent. The Sheikh beamed as he reached for his coat. "And of course, if you're lazy, you can't make sense of it.

They knew that a great painting could pull emotion out of a viewer. But the world’s different from how it was during the Renaissance, when beauty was as necessary as oxygen, and when religion was an entry point for art. So they tried to figure out what it would take to inspire that same flood of joy or grief or awe today. It’s what feeling would look like, on canvas, if it was in its most raw form.

University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.

The masters must be copied over and over again," Degas said, "and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature." Degas first received permission to copy paintings at the Louvre in 1853 when he was eighteen. He was most interested in the great works of the Italian Renaissance and of his own classical French heritage, hence this detailed copy of Poussin's painting

Be Willing to Pay the Price If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all. MICHELANGELO Renaissance sculptor and painter who spent 4 years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price. Maybe that price is pursuing one single activity while putting everything else in your life on hold. Maybe it’s investing all of your own personal wealth or savings. Maybe it’s the willingness to walk away from the safety of your current situation. But though many things are typically required to reach a successful outcome, the willingness to do what’s required adds that extra dimension to the mix that helps you persevere in the face of overwhelming challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages. And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti’s poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was struck by Theophile Gautier’s advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet’s reading.

The very idea of a national plan, which would be devised at the capital and would then reorder the periphery after its own image into quasi-military units obeying a single command, was profoundly centralizing. Each unit at the periphery was tied not so much to its neighboring settlement as to the command center in the capital; the lines of communication rather resembled the converging lines used to organize perspective in early Renaissance paintings. “The convention of perspective … centers everything in the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of travelling outward, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God

It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation. And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year 1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for discussions on art, the result of such discussions being that the English Philistine public was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise English painting and poetry. They called themselves the pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - among whom the names of Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you - had on their side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm.

Yet another strategy for encoding in Renaissance works involved environmental “special effects.” Messages were ingeniously inserted so that they could be viewed only when one was in situ, in the very spot where the artist intended for the viewer to receive his true intent. Often this would be determined by how light coming from an actual window at the site would stream into the painting, thus literally and figuratively illuminating the piece. Leonardo did this with the light in his Last Supper fresco,

I remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science, his saying to me, ‘the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.’ But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art. Where in the arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human sympathy which is the condition of all noble work; where in the arts are we to look for what Mazzini would call the social ideas as opposed to the merely personal ideas? By virtue of what claim do I demand for the artist the love and loyalty of the men and women of the world? I think I can answer that. Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter for his own soul. He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or peace like Angelico; he may come with mourning like the great Athenian or with mirth like the singer of Sicily; nor is it for us to do aught but accept his teaching, knowing that we cannot smite the bitter lips of Leopardi into laughter or burden with our discontent Goethe’s serene calm. But for warrant of its truth such message must have the flame of eloquence in the lips that speak it, splendour and glory in the vision that is its witness, being justified by one thing only - the flawless beauty and perfect form of its expression: this indeed being the social idea, being the meaning of joy in art. Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace where there is no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the pictorial charm only, the wonder of its colour, the satisfying beauty of its design.

The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.

Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her.

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. The slow spaciousness of the green felt mirrors some internal state you get to after a few beers. Back at school, I’d been trying to read the philosophy of art, which I was grotesquely unequipped to do but nonetheless stuck on. I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger. In those days the drug culture was pimping “expanded consciousness,” a lie that partly descended from the old postindustrial lie of progress: any change in how your head normally worked must count as an improvement. Maybe my faith in that lie slid me toward an altered state that day. Or maybe it was just the beer, which I rarely drank. In any case, walking around the pool table, I felt borne forward by some internal force or fire. My first shot sank a ball. Then I made the most unlikely bank shot in history to drop two balls at once after a wild V trajectory. Daddy whistled. The sky through the window had gone the exact blue of the chalk I was digging my cue stick in, a shade solid and luminous at once, like the sheer turquoise used for the Madonna’s robe in Renaissance paintings. Slides from art history class flashed through my head. For a second, I lent that color some credit, as if it meant something that made my mind more buoyant. But that was crazy.

Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable and elusive beauty.

56. There are, however, many stories of women—particularly saints—blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity, to prove that they “only have eyes” for God or Christ. Consider, for example, the legend of Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, whose name means “clear, radiant, understandable. What seems clear enough: in 304 ad Lucy was tortured and put to death by the Roman emperor Diocletian, and thus martyred for her Christianity. What is unclear: why, exactly, she runs around Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it. Some say her eyes were tortured out of her head in her martyrdom; some say she gouged them out herself after being sentenced by the pagan emperor to be defiled in a brothel. Even more unclear are the twinned legends of Saint Medana (of Ireland) and Saint Triduana (of Scotland), two Christian princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan lovers—lovers who professed to be unable to live without their beloveds’ beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor’s feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore here out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer. 57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim.

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.

Cups and Rings and Drawings. I stopped by a famed park, Picked a blank sheet And drew a cup. For me, it represented me holding myself up in a storm, It represented the start of life, Something to pour out every lesson learnt Out of every misfortune we’ve ever been. The cup — the container to hold chocolate drink Water. Wine and strawberries. I drew a ring, A marriage between blessing and joy The bloom of flowers in spring The sprouting of leaves in midsummer And the smell of fresh grasses at night. I drew Monalisa I painted art I became Michaelangelo Da Vinci I became the Renaissance I healed through art “Don’t you know that you are gods?” So the first day, I cleared the storms out of my life. The second day, I dried all my tears The third day, I reinvented myself. The fourth day, I finally remembered what it felt like to be happy Like two children drawing arts on a canvass. Delilah & Annabelle Arts curled out of girls trying to reinvent the world Or the colours of the rainbow. The fifth day, I opened the windows wide To let the lights shine in. “When I’m down on my knees you’re how I pray.” The sixth day I created my favourite masterpiece — Baroque. The seventh day, I admired myself in the mirror. I missed me I missed the time I had so much optimism I miss you And I miss writing so innocently.

None,” Einstein said. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”51 That was no doubt true. However, there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism. In his novel Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell had his character declare, “The Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless literature.” The relativity proposition, of course, was not directly responsible for any of this. Instead, its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers who seemed to break the bonds of classical thinking.52 In his book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, the historian of science and philosophy Arthur I. Miller explored the common wellsprings that produced, for example, the 1905 special theory of relativity and Picasso’s 1907 modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.' Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that too. It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A DISPARU.

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.

Spring is the promise of a solution to a problem (the problem being winter...) I believe we all kind of secretly expect that on March 21 of each year the cold clouds will part like silver drapes, unveiling a Renaissance painting interpretation of our cities. It's not what we were promised, nor what we've even probably experienced, and yet we feel entitled to it. It is embarrassingly infuriating when we are forced to continue slogging through with no expiration date.

Giotto, the shepherd’s boy who humanized painting, paved the way for the Renaissance in art, while Nicola Pisano was doing the same for sculpture.

Unfortunately for the composers of the time, wealthy Renaissance merchants were more likely to commission a painting than a composition. The painting could be owned, repeatedly shown off, and later resold, unlike the music. The financial incentive to commission a composition, which can be enjoyed by any audience member, was weaker. Paintings were closer to private goods, and musical performances were closer to public goods.

I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong. I am old - old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.

Money Facts The Lira was the basic unit of Italian currency from 1861, when Ital was unified, to 2002. That year, Italy adopted the euro, the currency of the European Union (EU). Today, fifteen EU states use the euro. One euro is divided into 100 cents. Bills come in values of 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 euros. Coins come in values of 1 and 2 euros as well as 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents. In 2008, US$1.00 equaled about 0.63 euros, and 1.00 euro equaled US$1.58. On the front of each euro note is an image of a window or a gateway. On the back is a picture of a bridge. These images do not represent any actual bridges or windows. Instead, they are examples from different historical periods. Each country designs its own euro coins. Italy chose to honor its greatest artists. Its 2-euro coin shows a portrait by the Renaissance artist Raphael. The 1-euro coin shows a drawing of the human body by Leonardo da Vinci. Other Italian coins show a statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Sandro Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus. The 1-cent coin, the smallest, features Castel del Monte, a thirteenth-century castle near Bari.

I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there's money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn't you go out and paint?

Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses. I see this in my students. Proficient on the computer, they click out sophisticated graphics. But they are baffled by and fumble with a brush, frustrated at the time it takes to manually create what they can Photoshop in a flash. I’ve taught art for a quarter of a century and rely on sound lesson plans and discipline as well as creative freedom. Still, during each drawing, painting, and ceramic class I teach, I remind myself how I felt when I scratched out my first drawings, brushed paint on a surface, or learned to center porcelain on a wheel—how it felt to tame and be liberated by the media. And, how it felt to become discouraged by an instructor’s insistence on controlling a pencil, paintbrush, or lump of clay her or his way. For most of my Kuwaiti students, a class taken with me will be their first and last studio arts class. I work at creating a learning environment both structured and free, one that cultivates an atmosphere where one learns to give herself permission to see.

Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses.

It’s enough for me just to sit in front of the paintings of Mahmud Sa’id and the statues of Mahmud Mukhtar. God, if you could only see his statue ‘Egypt’s Renaissance’! God, if you could only see the statue of ‘The Peasant Woman’ or ‘The Khamasin.’ God, if you could only hear Umm Kulthum and Abd al-Wahhab!

Why paint at all? ... Do you like painting? Yes? Very well, then, that is a good enough reason. "But the results are rather laughable," you may say. All right, laugh. It will do you a lot of good. You find it impossible to say all that you want to say? So did Rembrandt and any other artist who ever lived. "My perspective drawing is weak." So it was in all art up to the Renaissance. "I can't get the colours as bright." Agreed - and here the position is worse than you think! Take a sheet of white paper or a piece of canvas painted with your whitest white. Hold it up against the light. It is a dirty grey. And your blackest black is not as dark as the absence of light in nature. Your keyboard, so to speak, is restricted. That is why it is stating the obvious to look at a landscape and say, "Look at that. No artist could paint it." He can paint much of what the speaker sees, however, and because the artist sees deeper, he may paint something more.

I admired Bolden’s abilities. I’ve long thought that a good prosecutor is a well-trained union carpenter building a sturdy house with shiny tools and freshly hewn wood. She follows blueprints to the letter, makes sure the framing is in plumb, lines up the two-by-fours, and hammers the nails straight. The best courtroom carpenters are Renaissance men and women. They double as bricklayers, installers, tapers, finishers, electricians, and even plumbers. They can build the whole damn house, and it’s a thing of beauty that will pass the toughest inspection by city inspectors . . . or juries. Until the defense lawyers come along. We’re the stealthy vandals wielding crowbars and spray paint. We tear down door frames, break windows, and spray graffiti on the walls. Our job is to destroy what the carpenters have built and feed it into the woodchipper.

He entered the room…and stopped dead in his tracks. She was sitting in an armchair by the grate, her small bare feet drawn up and to the side, an open book in her lap. Golden shards of firelight played over her vulnerable face as she glanced up at him. She was dressed in a high-necked white nightgown that was a little too big for her, with a blue cashmere lap robe draped over her waist and thighs. After setting the book on the floor, she pulled the lap robe up to her chest. The tension inside Grant rose to an excruciating pitch. She had the face of an angel, and the hair of the Devil’s handmaiden. The freshly washed locks flowed around her in a waist-length curtain, waves and curls of molten red that contained every shade from cinnamon to strawberry-gold. It was the kind of hair that nature usually bestowed on homely women to atone for their lack of physical beauty. But Vivien had a face and form that belonged in a Renaissance painting, except that the reality of her was more delicate and fresh than any painted image could convey. Now that her eyes were no longer swollen, the pure blue intensity of her gaze shone full and direct on him. Her mouth, tender and rose-tinted, was a marvel of nature. Something was wrong with his breathing. His lungs weren’t working properly, his heartbeat was too fast, and he clenched his teeth. If he weren’t a civilized man, if he didn’t pride himself on his renowned self-possession, he would take her here, now, with no regard for the consequences. He wanted her that badly.

Mani Kaul, the most strikingly non-narrative of the Indian arthouse filmmakers of the sixties and seventies, was also a student and exponent of the dhrupad. I don’t know if it was his exposure to the raga that made his films (according to many) notoriously slow, and Kaul (this is known to relatively few) a ferocious critic of the Renaissance. The Renaissance painting, like proscenium theatre, or, indeed, the realist story, gives centre-stage to a protagonist – that is, the human being. Renaissance art’s development of perspective helps consolidate the rules of realism: a foreground or central theme, and a background occupied by what’s necessary to complete the portrait of the protagonist. Kaul’s cinema wished to be unfettered by hero or theme; he wanted the camera to devote itself equally to recording things ordinarily consigned to ‘background’.

I am never able to forget the possibility of block. Paradoxically, it drives my writing—compelling me to put aside everything else because of the possibility that today may be the last day I will ever be able to write. It’s another way writer’s block is sometimes not the opposite of hypergraphia but the cause. Perhaps writers could reclaim the concept of block as Saint Jerome in his study used a memento mori (a skull, or an hourglass with the sands of time slipping away) to drive his work, in those lovely Renaissance paintings

From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing! I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations. Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them. And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.

The Jesus portrayed in the United States, Europe and many other parts of the world is, quite ironically, a homosexual Jesus from the Renaissance, because that's what Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, both gays, loved to paint in the churches. People often claim that there is no proof of this but how could there be any concrete proof? First of all, being a homosexual could get you to be burned alive in a public square, and second, only the Vatican would offer jobs to artists. So imagine having to work for a boss you hate and at the same time, while being afraid he knows about your personal life and kills you. The mental pressure of these artists must have been brutal, which is why they compensated for it by hiding meanings inside their art, and just as many musicians and other artists do today when they want to tell you something that can end their career. And what a greater way to take a piss at the Vatican than that of painting Jesus as the men they loved? That's exactly what they did. Today, christians worship gay men while Da Vinci and Michaelangelo are still laughing somewhere. Because that's what great artists do, they laugh at the dogmas of society.

Finny looks like a Renaissance painting of an angel or like he could belong to some modern royal family. His hair stays blond all winter and looks like gold in the summer.

If we look at depictions of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, or the Wedding at Cana, or the Sermon on the Mount, there is far more variability in how Renaissance painters imagined the scenes. So why this strict adherence to form in the case of the Annunciation? I would argue (and have argued; see Renaissance Quarterly volume XX, issue 3) that for the Renaissance masters the Annunciation was the equivalent of the sonnet for the Elizabethan poets: an artistic endeavor with strict rules that tested the ingenuity of the craftsman and allowed him to showcase his talents to his peers. The Annunciation was the perfect subject matter for such a game because it simultaneously required the rendition of a landscape in the distance and an architectural space up close, interior and exterior light, the human and divine forms, and the varied textures of fabric, feathers, and a flower. In other words, if one could paint an Annunciation, one could paint anything. Needless to say, in tackling his Annunciation, DiDomenico followed form.

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.

I did love Ben, in a sense. Because he cooked for me. Because he told me that my body was beautiful, like a Renaissance painting, something I badly needed to hear. Because his stepmother was the same age as him, and that is really sad. But I also didn’t: Because his vanity drove him to wear vintage shoes that gave him blisters. Because he gave me HPV. He called me terrible names when I broke up with him for a Puerto Rican named Joe with a tattoo that said mom in Comic Sans. Admittedly, I didn’t handle it too well either when, several months later, he moved in with a girl who taught special-needs preschool. I didn’t utter the words “I love you” again in a romantic context for more than two years. Joe turned out to consider blow jobs misogynistic and pretended his house had caught fire just to get out of plans.

It wasn't some cheap renaissance festival rip off crossbow, either. It was the finest that money could buy, so I wasn't sure why a college student had it. Fiberglass body, a red dot scope, recurve arms, carbon arrows, and a swanky camouflage paint job. It had so much and tech and moving parts, I expected it to transform into a highly intelligent robot and fight to save the world.

I've been strongly influenced, in technique as well as subject matter, by some of the early 20th-century book illustrators — Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac in particular, Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts-&-Crafts movement they engendered. I'm continually inspired by Rembrandt, Breughel (I've wondered whether his brilliant "Tower of Babel" had inspired Tolkien's description of Minas Tyrith), Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Turner; it's not necessarily that they influence my work in any particular direction, more that their example raises my spirits, re-affirms my belief in the power of images to move and delight us, and shows me how much further I have to go, how much is possible. Having visited Venice and Florence for the first time, I am besotted with the Italian Renaissance artists — Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci and others. Their work is calm, controlled, and yet each face and landscape contains such passion. In Botticelli's paintings, every pebble and every leaf is rendered with a religious devotion; there is reverence inherent in paying such close attention to every stone, turning painting itself into a form of worship, an act of prayer.

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view. Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.

and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was

Next panel [Plate 9]: Adam and Eve—painted by Masaccio—as they are thrown out of Eden. (Masaccio seems to have been, too.) The figures are less standard, even less accurate, than Masolino’s: Adam’s arms are far too short, his right calf is impossibly bowlegged; Eve’s arms are of unequal length and she is dumpier than in Masolino’s version, with a fat back and hefty haunches and an awfully thick right ankle. But they are alive, believable, fleshy!—and being pushed forward into all the horror of real life. Adam’s stomach, sucked in and emphasizing his vulnerable ribs, displays the tension of inconsolable grief; Eve’s hands, placed to shield her belles choses (and copied by Masaccio from the teasing poses of ancient Venuses), have been transformed into demonstrations of irremediable shame. Her breast, peeking out above her wrist, is a real breast; and Adam’s genitals are downright funky—not smoothly attractive, not ready for the style section of the Sunday newspaper, just their grotty selves. Never before had such nudes been seen or even thought of. How far they are from the ideal figures of the ancients, as well as from the self-censoring expressions of so many Christian centuries.

Future historians, discovering the ruins of this single building—the frescoes are painted to endure as long as the walls themselves—would be able from them alone to reconstruct a rich and varied picture of the Mexican land, its people, their labors, festivals, ways of living, struggles, aspirations, dreams. From it, too, they could reconstruct some notion of the thought-currents of the Western world in our time. Not since the Renaissance has any work embodied so vast a cosmology and sociology as this.

It's unfortunate that we don't have a mentor system anymore. In the Renaissance, artists were apprentices to masters. You learn to do a painting by painting. But now we're all on the Internet cruising around, looking for a quick fix. So I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path. But it takes a long time to hear your voice, and to learn how to control material. It is amazing what words on a page can do. You think you have said it well, and you look at it three days later and realize it's a mess. I think writers coming into the business can't see the mess. Their prose seems sterling to them six months later, and its hard to recognize that there's still much to be learned.

She had the face of an angel, and the hair of the Devil's handmaiden. The freshly washed locks flowed around her in a waist-length curtain, waves and curls of molten red that contained every shade from cinnamon to strawberry-gold. It was the kind of hair that nature usually bestowed on homely women to atone for their lack of physical beauty. But Vivien had a face and form that belonged in a Renaissance painting, except that the reality of her was more delicate and fresh than any painted image could convey. Now that her eyes were no longer swollen, the pure blue intensity of her gaze shone full and direct on him. Her mouth, tender and rose-tinted, was a marvel of nature.

Which court will take a chance on a woman? How could they compensate you? For a woman in your position, accepting payment would demean you.

Wayne and Shuster, the comedian team, never fail to get a good laugh when they line up a group of ancient Roman cops in togas and have them number themselves from left to right, uttering Roman numerals. This joke demonstrates how the pressure of numbers caused men to seek ever more streamlined methods of numeration. Before the advent of ordinal, successive, or positional numbers, rulers had to count large bodies of soldiery by displacement methods. Sometimes they were herded by groups into spaces of approximately known area. The method of having them march in file and of dropping pebbles into containers was another method not unrelated to the abacus and the counting board. Eventually the method of the counting board gave rise to the great discovery of the principle of position in the early centuries of our era. By simply putting 3 and 4 and 2 in position on the board, one after another, it was possible to step up the speed and potential of calculation fantastically. The discovery of calculation by positional numbers rather than by merely additive numbers led, also, to the discovery of zero. Mere positions for 3 and 2 on the board created ambiguities about whether the number was 32 or 302. The need was to have a sign for the gaps between numbers. It was not till the thirteenth century that sifr, the Arab word for “gap” or “empty,” was Latinized and added to our culture as “cipher” (ziphrium) and finally became the Italian zero. Zero really meant a positional gap. It did not acquire the indispensable quality of “infinity” until the rise of perspective and “vanishing point” in Renaissance painting. The new visual space of Renaissance painting affected number as much as lineal waiting had done centuries earlier.

Before Breitwieser can filter out the truth, it slips pridefully through. He admits that he has stolen sixty-nine Renaissance paintings.

In October, Louise showed several new paintings at the Panoras Gallery on Fifty-Sixth Street. During this period, she painted nudes, interiors, several versions of MacDuff, many portraits, at least two paintings set in public buses, and other New York street-life subjects. Her stylized figures were often inspired by random encounters and eavesdropping. Observing underdogs and outsiders in action, she was drawn to faces and to cityscapes and to a style that incorporated storytelling and allegory. Louise’s new work was influenced by the scene painting of the Works Progress Administration and Mexican muralists; by Käthe Kollwitz and German expressionists like Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; by Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, and other portraitists—and, to an increasing extent, by medieval tapestries and frescoes by Bolognese Renaissance artists such as Pellegrino Tibaldi. Louise kept working to reveal the lives behind the faces she portrayed—their backstory—and began to introduce some southern imagery from her own memories. She was fascinated by the story beneath the surface and whatever metaphysical qualities she could draw from the depths of her subject.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Frank J. An Illustrated History of the Herbals. Columbia University Press. Baernstein, P. Renee. A Convent Tale. Routledge Press. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford University Press. Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. University of Chicago Press. Bornstein, Daniel, editor. Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. University of Chicago Press. Broedel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft. Manchester University Press. Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford University Press.

Easy conversation follows, and I listen as he talks about how he became enamored of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings. This love affair, he reveals, did not occur immediately, but in stages over time.

For the past twenty minutes Keith had been explaining to Jackson Crane his philosophy of art, and how this was reflected in his own practice. "I would say I don't really have a /medium/, you know? Painting, photography, poetry, sculpture - I've mastered them all. It's not for me to call myself a Renaissance man, but. . ." He shrugged. "It has been said. Really if I had to say what my art was /about/, though, it's a celebration of the female form but also a rumination on the gaze. That's why I only use the body, not the head, so they're not looking backing at you - there's a purity there, you know? /In the looking./ Power in anonymity. I want to confront the viewer - but I'm posing questions. The viewer has to answer those questions themselves . . .

Whatever it was that drove this passion for collecting, it had an important civic function, Marietta thought. After all, without the largesse of the Medici family, would the Renaissance have happened? Would Florence possess the eternal collection of architecture, painting, and sculpture that it does today?

To put the ensuing craze for mirrors in perspective: in the early sixteenth century an elaborate Venetian mirror was more valuable than a painting by one of the giants of the Renaissance, Raphael, and at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, the Countess of Fiesque swapped a piece of land for a mirror. In 1684 the Hall of Mirrors was completed at the Palace of Versailles: it was comprised of more than 300 panes of mirrored glass, so that royalty could see their glory reflected seemingly to infinity.

Hitler was – well, a bit of a Hitler, to put it bluntly. He got what he wanted. Nobody stood in his way. But there was one incident this reminds me of. I’m thinking of the Kröller-Müller Museum. Goering was very much taken by three paintings there that the museum’s benefactors had bought in Germany. A Portrait of a Lady by Bruyn the Elder, a Venus by Cranach and another Venus by Hans Baldung Grien. He reckoned the price had been set too low and they ought to go back to Germany – to his own private collection, natch. So he sent in Kajetan Mühlmann to deal with the museum’s director. Goering got his pictures but he had to let one of them go. Hans Posse, the Linz director, wrote to Martin Bormann saying the Baldung Grien Venus was one of the masterpieces of the German Renaissance. When Hitler got wind of this, he snapped up the painting for Linz. There was nothing Goering could do.

Almost all the Renaissance and Baroque paintings we studied in class were of baby Jesus, which is not very interesting, so when I saw Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings of biblical women killing all those horrible men, my heart trembled. She was such a bad ass.

cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.

Bosch was not possessed by a deranged spirit but the possessor of a cool, calculating mind. His supreme mastery of the arts is proved by his ability to paint cerebrally constructed devils, of which the component parts each has its own meaning.

On February 7, 1601, about two years before the queen’s death, an uprising against the crown had begun at the Globe Theatre with a treasonous production of Richard II in which Elizabeth was satirized as the incompetent Richard surrounded by villainous counselors. This rebellion, which would march on London the following morning, was led by two fallen favorites, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, and Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. We can’t be sure of their motive in starting this doomed rebellion, but it seems likely these two hyper-educated earls, symbols of the fast-fading English Renaissance, had been attempting to free their aged queen from the grasp of her powerful secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, in order to thwart Cecil’s plan to control the crown upon Elizabeth’s death.

What she wanted was technique. She wanted to paint like a Renaissance old master. She wanted to know what color Titian tinted his canvas before he started working on it. She wanted to know what colors Caravaggio mixed to make his lights. She wanted to know exactly which pigments Rubens utilized to achieve those juicy fleshy tones, what brown Rembrandt used in his shadows, what combination of oils and resins went into Vermeer's painting medium. She wanted someone to show her how to make Raphael's line and Michelangelo's muscle masses. She wanted to know what made a good composition, and what made a bad one. She wanted to know.

Here the nuns were safely sequestered in a sprawling complex completely surrounded by walls. Theirs quickly became the most populous convent in Florence, housing more than a hundred sisters by 1300 and boasting a giant wooden crucifix painted by the great Cimabue and a series of frescoes showing scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary.

In paintings and manuscript work young Renaissance men appear utterly gorgeous, jewelled and colourful. The images aim to show beauty as a signifier of inward purity and Godliness, and therefore nothing to do with sex. But they are sexy, and doubtless they appeared so during the sixteenth century, depending on who was looking.