Ancient Art Quotes

As a boy, I used to look upon the hieroglyphics as so many wonderful pictures.

Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started.

Heavy pillars, carved from the rock, bear the roof. Slowly, one's eyes become accustomed to the dim light; then they can make out marvelous representations from Indian mythology carved on the walls.

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.

I think that painting is a very ancient form of expression.

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.

I didn't study Greek mythology in school and I wish I had.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.

When I was In high school, I became interested in Greek mythology. I had to know all about the exact dates of all the history.

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit; as Athens.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

In 2010, when the Lotus Sutra was made available to me by a private dealer, I was very fortunate to be able to have it. It is very long, 30 feet or something crazy like that. It has some 15,000 very small standard script characters that the artist Zhao Mengfu in the Yuan dynasty made when he was in his 60s.

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

One meets the cat in nearly all forms of art...curiously enough she is not a conspicuous figure in Roman or Greek art.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song.