Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoniwas an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered to be the greatest living artist during his lifetime, he has since also been described as one of the greatest artists of all time. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth6 March 1475
CityCaprese, Italy
CountryItaly
True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.
I live and love in God's peculiar light.
For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.
Already at sixteen, 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.
Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all.
I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.
What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
One paints with one's head, not one's hand.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
Nature did all things well
A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
And still I am learning.