Michelangelo Quotes

“St Peter’s – as Michelangelo re-imagined it – was the prototypical baroque church. Elderly, grief-stricken, constipated, Michelangelo made himself a great master of architecture: an art that, of course, was not even his profession.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“His sonnet no. 152 uses the metaphor of sculpture for salvation: ‘By what we take away, lady, we give to a rugged mountain stone/A figure that can live? And which grows greater when the stone grows less.’ Here was the fascination with sculpture as an act of discovery within a piece of marble: by chipping away, the figure was slowly revealed.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Indeed, in his view, being difficult – ‘singular and reserved, or whatever you may be pleased to call it’ – was actually a necessity for those who wanted to achieve remarkable things.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Night’ was a code word for sodomy in Tuscan comic literature – as is suggested by the title of the magistrates specifically detailed to deal with the problem, the Officers of the Night. According to court records, most encounters between casual male partners took place between sunset, when work ended, and the third or fourth hour after nightfall, the time of curfew, when the taverns closed.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“To understand Michelangelo and his art, it is necessary to accept both these truths. He believed that the sight of beautiful individuals was a path to the divine beauty and goodness of God. Simultaneously, it was a source of hopeless erotic yearning.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“There was another, theological reason for nudes to be painted, which neatly dovetailed with the cult of ancient art. In these decades, from the 1490s to the 1520s, preachers in Rome laid great stress on the doctrine of the incarnation, that is, the fact that Christ was God made man. And this meant that the human body – which, in turn, because of the automatic misogyny of the times, meant the male body – was not the shameful, sinful thing it had been considered to be through much of the Middle Ages, but glorious, beautiful and holy.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“The popular reaction to David seems to have been wonder at his size rather than at the artistry of his carving. He was a spectacle, a freakish oddity.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“He never signed anything ever again, because he didn’t need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“so often with Michelangelo, the strangeness is inseparable from the power of the work.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Medieval Romans colonized the vestiges of the ancient city as sea creatures might a sunken ship. Amphitheatres and temples were turned into fortified strongholds; the monuments of the imperial capital were used as quarries for building materials. An entire neighbourhood was devoted to burning classical marbles, sculptures included, to turn them into lime: steadily reducing the glories of antiquity to powder.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Michelangelo, however, stood apart from these musical parties. It sounds as though, even as an adolescent, he was already antisocial, reclusive and driven: constantly drawing and carving. Only such dedication could explain the rapidity of the progress he made. Within two years, he had become as skilful a sculptor in marble as any alive.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“But Michelangelo did not want us to know how he learned to sculpt and, whatever the truth of the matter, he succeeded in suppressing it. The impression he wanted to pass down was that he just picked up the art of sculpture through sheer brilliance and inherent understanding of design; conceivably, that might even be correct.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“A plentiful supply of paper – just as much as the study of ancient sculpture or single-point perspective – was among the factors that led to what we call the Renaissance. It allowed artists to think and work in different ways, a transformation as significant as the Internet and computer technology have been in the early twenty-first century.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Early financial anxiety combined with an engrained family belief that the Buonarroti were really grander than their current circumstances would suggest goes some way to explaining Michelangelo’s eccentricities. In later life he showed a strong, indeed neurotic, desire for money together with an equally powerful urge not to spend it.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“The gold in Michelangelo’s strongbox represented only a fraction – considerably less than half – of his total assets, most of which were invested in property. He was not only the most famous painter or sculptor in history, he was probably richer than any artist who had ever been. This was just one of many contradictions in Michelangelo’s nature: a wealthy man who lived frugally; a skinflint who could be extraordinarily, embarrassingly generous; a private, enigmatic individual who spent three quarters of a century near the heart of power.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“There’s no hurt that’s equal to time lost.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life