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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
Based
Classical
Losing
Formal
Thought
Conventional
Without
Originals
Life
Burden
Bear
Inner
Nudes
Bears
Completeness

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The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called top people before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.
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The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.
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People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
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The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
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I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.
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All color is no color.
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Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.
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Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.
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A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
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In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
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The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
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