The first evolved landscape in European painting – the background of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb; the foreground is painted with a medieval sharpness of detail. ibid.
Early Renaissance architecture is based on a passion for mathematics. ibid.
Rome ... A city of weight. The city that is like a huge compost heap. A city of human hopes and ambitions. A wilderness of imperial splendour despoiled of its ornament almost indecipherable. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 5/13: The Hero as Artist
Michelangelo and Raphael were to some extent the creation of Julius: without him Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine ceiling, nor would Raphael have decorated the papal apartments. ibid.
In the fifteenth century Greco-Roman sculpture had become a shining almost inaccessible model to the more adventurous artists. ibid.
The city fathers also commissioned ... a gigantic figure of David ... What a man! Everyone who met Michelangelo recognised that he had an unequal power of mind and skill of hand. ibid.
The Sistine ceiling passionately asserts the unity of man’s body, mind and spirit. ibid.
Raphael was above all a man of his age. Even in his early work still painted in the clear self-contained style of the fifteenth century he has begun to absorb and harmonise all that was being felt or thought by the finest spirits of his time. He is the supreme harmoniser. ibid.
One more giant: Leonardo da Vinci ... He belongs to no epoch; he fits into no category. ibid.
He was the most relentlessly curious man in history. ibid.
Leonardo’s curiosity was matched by an indefatigable energy. He is never satisfied with a single answer. ibid.
Every dissection was drawn with marvellous precision. ibid.
The golden moment was almost over. But while it lasted man achieved a stature that he has hardly ever achieved before or since. Because to the humanist virtues of intelligence was added the quality of heroic will. For a few years it seemed that there was nothing that the human mind couldn’t master and harmonize. ibid.
In the late Middle Ages the civilisation of northern Europe seemed designed to last for ever. Rich merchants, self-satisfied guilds, a conveniently loose political organisation, no material reasons for change. And yet in a few years in a single generation came the first of those explosions that were to create contemporary man – what we call the Reformation. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 6/13: Protest & Communication
The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism. ibid.
It was still an age of internationalism. ibid.
He’d [Erasmus] seen enough of religious life to know that the church must be reformed not only in its institutions but in its teachings. It was once the great civiliser of Europe, and now it was aground, stranded on forms and vested interests. ibid.
The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. It made him and unmade him ... Erasmus’s Praise of Folly was an outburst of this kind. ibid.
Whatever else he may have been Luther was a hero. ibid.
One fancies that Nordic man took a long time to emerge from the primeval forest. ibid.
H G Wells once made a useful distinction between what he called communities of obedience and communities of will. ibid.
The lady chapel at Ely – all the painted glass smashed ... There wasn’t much religion about it; it was an instinct. ibid.
Luther gave his countrymen words. ibid.
The wars of religion evoked a figure new to European civilisation, although familiar in the great ages of China, the intellectual recluse. ibid.
Albrecht Durer ... He deliberately painted himself as a traditional pose of Christ. ibid.
Durer shared Leonardo’s curiosity, but it was a curiosity about appearances not about causes. ibid.
No-one has ever described natural objects more minutely. Yet to my eye something is missing – the inner life. ibid.
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment ... fills the whole end wall of the Sistine Chapel. It’s a disturbing, a crushing, work. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 7/13: Grandeur & Obedience
The great artists of the time were all sincere conforming Christians. ibid.
The great religious art of the world in every country is deeply involved with the female principle. ibid.
Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin a baroque picture ... was painted in the same period as his great celebrations of paganism ... The art we call Baroque was a popular art. ibid.
The work of Bernini is ideal and eternal. He was a very great artist ... He not only gave baroque Rome its character but he was the chief source of an international style that has spread all over Europe ... He was dazzlingly precocious ... He became more skilful in the carving of marble than any sculptor has ever been. ibid.
By the 1620s the rich Romans families, who were in fact the families of successive popes, had begun to compete as patrons and collectors. ibid.
Bernini was only twenty five and the very next year he was made the architect of St Peter’s. ibid.
Bernini is perhaps the only artist in history who has been able to carry through such a vast design over so long a period. ibid.
The Bronze Baldacchino ... It’s incredible ... The perfection of craftsmanship that extends to every detail. ibid.
Light. The light of early morning. The light of Holland. It spreads over the flat fields, it’s reflected in the canals, and it picks out distant towers and spires. This was the inspiration of the first great school of landscape; one might almost say skyscape painting. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 8/13: The Light of Experience
The Harlem painter Frans Hals: He is the supreme extrovert. ibid.
They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy. ibid.
A demand for realism ... Paul Potter’s Bull was one of the most famous pictures in Holland ... Isn’t that fleecy neck of the sheep extraordinary? ibid.
They also got Rembrandt. Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth. And that appeal to experience which had begun with the Reformation. ibid.
His etchings are the fullest communication any artist has made since Durer’s engravings. ibid.
Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible in the light of human experience. But it’s an emotional response based on the belief of the revealed truth. ibid.
Vermeer manages to observe an air of complete naturalism. Yet what a masterpiece of abstract design he creates out of frames and windows and musical instruments. ibid.
A revolutionary change in thought: the revolution in which divine authority was replaced by experience, experiment and observation. ibid.
Alas, a belief in divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the protestants just as much as the Catholics. ibid.
Descartes wanted to cut away all preconceptions and get down to bedrock of experience unaffected by custom and convention. ibid.
The Dutch were the great cartographers of the age. ibid.
The great art of the time was religious art. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 9/13: The Pursuit of Happiness
The German speaking countries have once more become articulate. ibid.
18th century German and Austria ... Borromini the second great craftsmen of the Baroque. ibid.
One of the great geniuses of western Europe – Johann Sebastian [Bach]. ibid.
Handal ... The two great musicians of the eighteenth century – Bach and Handal. ibid.
Opera next to Gothic architecture is one of the oddest inventions of modern man. ibid.
Voltaire: He’s smiling, the smile of reason ... So do all the other distinguished writers, philosophers, dramatists and hostesses of the French eighteenth century. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 10/13, The Smile of Reason
Although the victory of reason and tolerance was won in France, it was initiated in England. ibid.
In a way these eighteenth-century amateurs were the inheritors of the Renaissance idea of universal man. ibid.
That curious institution of the eighteenth century the salon. ibid.
Our whole society is based on different sorts of exploitation. ibid.