I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.
I never expected the White House to be warm, and the artwork on the walls was extraordinary. I am a fan of the Louvre, but being there it was almost just as good.
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
I've had the good fortune of studying the 17th-century art of Amsterdam in preparation for a film.
To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.
A little part of my life is built around ancient art.
When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.
Most of the songs I write are full of power, and I'm suspecting it may come from my love for grotesque Renaissance art and the Eurovision Song Contest.
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
When you walk in the front of the White House, the pictures on the walls, they change out pretty frequently. They're all very cool and historical, with pictures from the current term and past terms.
Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.
Throughout history, from Abyssinians and Greeks onward, artists, sculptors, and architects have worked together. I find this post - World War II thing, this segmentation of the arts, so lame. It's the laming of the arts.
On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.
More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.'
I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.
Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.
Back to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, there's always been run-ins between benefactors and artists.
Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.
I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.
If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary.
I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.
I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense.
There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.
