The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts of modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his obse...rvations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled "disciple of experience," was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle--practical-minded organizer and surveyor of experience--Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable, fall t...hereby into an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone which separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles o...f the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street, thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the Break-neck Sta...irs, into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the rock, which last led through a low, massive stone portal, called Prescott Gate, the principal thoroughfare into the Upper Town. This passage was defended by cannon, with a guard-house over it, a sentinel at his post, and other soldiers at hand ready to relieve him. I rubbed my eyes to be sure that I was in the Nineteenth Century, and was not entering one of those portals which sometimes adorn the frontispieces of new editions of old black-letter volumes. I thought it would be a good place to read Froissart's Chronicles. It was such a reminiscence of the Middle Ages as Scott's novels. Men apparently dwelt there for security! Peace be unto them! As if the inhabitants of New York were to go over to Castle William to live! What a place it must be to bring up children!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, inclu...ded,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place--s...ervice--social service--the ants' creed, the bees' creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that ...sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »