Quote #14
His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.
More from Kenneth Clark
- Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favo…
- Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
- It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodyi…
- Two pictures painted in the year 1907 can conveniently be taken as the starting point of twentieth-century art. They are Matisse's Blue Nud…
- Early artists considered the human body, that forked radish, that defenseless starfish, a poor vehicle for the expression of energy, compar…
- The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid t…
- Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps t…
- Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the wh…