85 Quotes by Kenneth Clark

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.

Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

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.

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!

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.

We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.

The great artist takes what he needs.

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.