HumanitiesWeb.org - More than Mortal - Michelangelo Buonarroti [Quotations]
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Michelangelo de Buonarotti
Quotations



"After four tortured years, more than 400 over life-sized figures, I felt as old and as weary as Jeremiah. I was only 37, yet friends did not recognize the old man I had become."
- On the work at the Sistine Chapel

"After four tortured years, more than 400 over life-sized figures, I felt as old and as weary as Jeremiah. I was only 37, yet friends did not recognize the old man I had become."
- On the work at the Sistine Chapel
 
"Already at 16, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms...one spiritual, the other earthly."
 
"I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible"
- 29 January 1542
 
"Many believe, - and I believe - that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him"
- On the work of St. Peter's Basilica
 
"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed? "
 
"Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture."
 
"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."
 
"Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed."
 
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. "
 
"It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen..."
 
"It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges. "
 
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