Quotes & Sayings About Italy And Art

The more fashionable doctors in Italy, began to delegate to slaves the manual attentions they deemed necessary for their patients ... that the art of medicine went to ruin. — Andreas Vesalius

Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land. — E. M. Forster

But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level ... The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris. — Tom Reiss

Later it would occur to him that a new life - to be a new man - would require him to take chances, to act on whim — John Galavan

Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two
a proof of the decline of that country. — Lord Chesterfield

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest. — Nouriel Roubini

I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona. — Frances Mayes

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life. — Marcella Hazan

If I could, I'd take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization. — Tsh Oxenreider

I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

California is an Italy without its art. — Oscar Wilde

I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick ... I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art ... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza. — James Joyce

Italy is the home of art and swindling; home of religion and moral rottenness — Mark Twain

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.
Valentine, while in Italy (pg 267) — Adriana Trigiani

Little do we find any Phoenician architecture or plastic art at all comparable even to those of Italy, to say nothing of the lands where art was native. — Theodor Mommsen

You are what you read. — Nancy Petralia

Broke my femur on a cruise with my wife in Italy. I'd walked back to my cabin after dinner with half a plate of spaghetti when I leaned in to open the door. Turns out it was already open, so I fell flat on my face like something from the Keystone Kops. — Art Donovan

I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound
that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world. — Ian Morgan Cron

There is in the DNA of the Italians a bit of madness, which in the overwhelming majority of cases is positive. It is genius. It is talent. It's the masterpieces of art. It's the food, fashion, everything that makes Italy great in the world. — Matteo Renzi

The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance. — Walter Shaw Sparrow

I want to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery. — Elizabeth Gilbert

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. — Gary Inbinder

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy. — Eric Scigliano

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco. — Irving Stone

Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if ... priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering. — Napoleon Bonaparte

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. — Renzo Piano

Saving Italy is an astonishing account of a little known American effort to save Italy's vast store of priceless monuments and art during World War II. While American warriors were fighting the length of the country, other Americans were courageously working alongside to preserve the irreplaceable best of Italy's culture. Read it and be proud of those who were on their own front lines of a cruel war. — Tom Brokaw

Eating in Italy is essentially a family art, practiced for and by the family. The finest accomplishments of the home cook are not reserved like the good silver and china for special occasions or for impressing guests, but are offered daily for the pleasure and happiness of the family group. — Marcella Hazan

When I was a young man, King Francois of France greatly admired my bare buttocks. I have that information only by hearsay, of course, because my buttocks were in the king's chateau of Chambord while I was here in Italy. — Alan Fisk

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom. — Edith Wharton

Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue. — G.K. Chesterton