Michelangelo
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Michelangelo Buonarroti (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was an Italian architect, painter, poet and sculptor.
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Sourced [edit]
- Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you ... It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old ... That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will."
- Letter to Tommaso dei Cavalieri (1 January 1533).
- Ancora Imparo
- Yet I am learning
- Inscribed next to an image of Father Time in a child's carriage, as quoted in Curiosities of Literature (1823) by Isaac Disraeli
- Variant translations:
- Still I learn!
- As translated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Poetry and Imagination" (1847)
- I am still learning.
- Yet I am learning
- Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
- As quoted in Character Sketches : Or, The Blackboard Mirror (1890) by George Augustus Lofton, p. 432.
- I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.
- As quoted in In Our Time : The Artist, BBC Radio 4 (28 March 2002).
- If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.
- As quoted in Happiness Is Everything! (2000) by Chris Crawford, p. 38, and in "The Blessing of Work" ( 6 March 2005) by David E. Sorensen
- If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius.
- On the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, as quoted in Speeches & Presentations Unzipped (2007) by Lori Rozakis, p. 71.
- As when, O lady mine,
With chiselled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.- Sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna; tr. Mrs. Henry Roscoe (Maria Fletcher Roscoe), Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems (1868), p. 169.
- A quel pietoso fonte, onde siam tutti,
S'assembra ogni beltà che qua si vede,
Più c'altra cosa alle persone accorte;- (from sonnet "Veggio nel tuo bel viso, Signor mio")
- Translation:
That fount of mercy, whence we all exist,
Every beauty seen here [on earth] resembles,
More than anything else to knowing persons;- Translated by Luciano Rebay, Invitation to Italian Poetry (1969), p. 77
- Variant translations:
- To those who are wise, nothing more resembles that merciful spring whence all derive than every beauty to be found here;
- Translated by Christopher Ryan, The poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction (1988), p. 103
- Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
- To those who are wise, nothing more resembles that merciful spring whence all derive than every beauty to be found here;
Disputed [edit]
- The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
- Attributed without citation in Ken Robinson, The Element (2009), p. 260. Widely attributed to Michelangelo since the late 1990s, this adage has not been found before 1980 when it appeared without attribution in E. C. McKenzie, Mac's giant book of quips & quotes.
Misattributed [edit]
- What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
- A few sites, perhaps most of them deriving their information from its previous placement among the "Attributed" quotes here, credit this to Michelangelo, but so far as definite citations go, it almost certainly originated with Frank Herbert when he used the phrase in the novel Dune (1965).
About [edit]
- Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!
- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad. Twain humorously depicts tourists being told that most every monument in Italy was designed or painted by "Michael Angelo", oblivious to the historic significance of "Michelangelo".
