art-historians

"I have more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the worldwide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism."

"Piety in art—poetry in art—Puseyism in art—let us be careful how we confound them."

"A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense."

"He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own."

"Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise: it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate it in silence."

"Reputation is but a synonyme of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters."

"Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness."

"The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us."

"The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself."

"As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections."

"During the first half of the present century those who visited and examined collections of Early Netherlandish Paintings were like explorers voyaging on a wild and unknown ocean without a chart; some of them making careful observations, and jotting down on their maps any land of the existence and extent of which they had acquired certain proof, and noting its characteristic features ; others, however, in their eagerness to make discoveries quickly, and to acquire renown, mistaking sandbanks and rocks seen through the mists for hitherto undiscovered countries, giving them names, dilating in elegant language on their beauties, and for a time obtaining the reputation of having added to the world's knowledge."

"A Philhllene of extraordinary passion, [Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him."

"So wie die Tiefe des Meers allezeit ruhig bleibt, die Oberfläche mag noch so wüten, ebenso zeiget der Ausdruck in den Figuren der Griechen bei allen Leidenschaften eine große und gesetzte Seele."

"The rising sense of history would gradually transform the Roman marble quarry into a vast open-air museum where the unlearned touring public could discover the past. [...] The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology, herald of this ever-widening public significance, was Johann Joachim Winckelmann."

"Die Nachahmung des Schönen der Natur ist entweder auf einen einzelnen Vorwurf gerichtet, oder sie sammlet die Bemerkungen aus verschiedenen einzelnen, und bringet sie in eins. Jenes heißt eine ähnliche Kopie, ein Porträt machen; es ist der Weg zu holländischen Formen und Figuren. Dieses aber ist der Weg zum allgemeinen Schönen und zu idealischen Bildern desselben; und derselbe ist es, den die Griechen genommen haben."

"Der gute Geschmack, welcher sich mehr und mehr durch die Welt ausbreitet, hat sich angefangen zuerst unter dem griechischen Himmel zu bilden. Alle Erfindungen fremder Völker kamen gleichsam nur als der erste Same nach Griechenland, und nahmen eine andere Natur und Gestalt an in dem Lande, welches Minerva, sagt man, vor allen Ländern, wegen der gemäßigten Jahreszeiten, die sie hier angetroffen, den Griechen zur Wohnung angewiesen, als ein Land welches kluge Köpfe hervorbringen würde."

"The discovery of Iran was only the first step toward a much greater surprise: I recognized that something stood behind Iran and its significance, something that linguistics has been occupied with for the last one hundred years without really getting anywhere: the Indo- German question."

"Even the threads that bind pre-Hellenic and archaic art to that of the people of the Levant have been much more energetically and lucidly studied than the many-sided inter-mixture of ancient oriental and Greek art in the age of the Diadochi; [and the] outcome (of this inter- mixture] has been seen in a much too one-sided way, as decline and fall. It was believed one could ignore [this art]; actually, however, the contact between the old and immobile and the young, fluid and adaptable [cultures] ought to be understood as the beginning of a new period of art and culture, one which is much more closely connected with the coming middle ages than with the era of the Persian Wars."

"... for an oriental philologist who undertook the study of art history was not seen as fully respectable, and an art historian, on the other hand, who worked without knowledge of the different languages was seen ever afterwards as a dilettante by the powers that be. Thus the difficult research on the transitional areas between antiquity and medieval art, one characterized by numerous national and linguistic opposing forces, has been left to colleagues who are ready either, as specialists, to die of hunger, or as pariahs, to knock about between the well-established research areas. Under such conditions it was not at all possible to establish the necessary foundations, and to do so [based on] philological fundamentals."

"Last March, I stood on the loggia of San Marco, by the reproduction horses, and made a drawing I'd been thinking about doing for a while--the entire sweep of Piazza San Marco from above. It was cold, but I stood still for two hours and became completely immersed in the making of the drawing. It is a wonderful thing to experience ... a total absorption ... and a strange sense of power that I can do this."

"The Oxford Project was a great thing to become involved in. It was created by two University of Iowa professors, Peter Feldstein and Steven G. Bloom. Peter started photographing everyone in Oxford, Iowa in 1984 in part as Conceptual Art and for sociological reasons, but also it was Peter's attempt to be accepted by the residents of this tiny Iowa town that he had moved to. He started rephotographing the same people 21 years later, in 2005, and Steve Bloom interviewed the portrait subjects. Feldstein and Bloom proposed The Oxford Project as an exhibition to the Des Moines Art Center. I was basically assigned the job of evaluating whether it was worth doing at our museum. I was intrigued and organized a selection of the works for an exhibition in 2007. The public response was incredible. The exhibition was also shown in Padova, Italy, where it was very well received. Italian viewers understood that these amazing stories were not just American, they were universal."

"Very much so. Being a curator and an artist is bad in one way. In deciding to work as a curator, I sacrificed my public persona as an artist. There are many conflict of interest issues that can arise. Although my museum has many of my prints in its permanent collection (these were acquired before I became a curatorial staff member), I certainly can't ever include my own work in an exhibition. Also, I feel extremely reluctant to try to promote my work to curatorial colleagues in other museums. That is really up to the gallery that represents my work. (I do have prints in numerous museum collections, but probably could have had a lot more). A museum would like to organize a retrospective of my work, but here again, I barely have time to prepare for it. Being a curator means no longer having all day to work in the studio. Sometimes, I come home and work from after dinner until midnight in the studio."

"My arrangement with the museum is that my schedule is mine to figure out. There are times when I have to be present in Des Moines, such as a month or so before the installation of a new exhibition. When I am in Des Moines I work very intensely, plan, and do much in advance to enable myself to be away for my regular two-month absences."

"I draw more frequently when I travel (and especially, when I am in Venice), than when I am in Des Moines. Besides an infinite number of drawings made in Italy, I have major bodies of work from time I have spent in Japan, France, Russia, Turkey (Istanbul), India and England. I have some drawings from my travels around the US too. I also make drawings while killing time in trains, planes, and airports."

"For over 600 years, artists have been drawing Venice. It is the most-drawn and painted city in the world. How can anyone find something new and fresh to say? All I could do was to draw the reality of my own existence there. I drew what I wanted to understand, or where I wanted to explore or spend time. By just remaining in a place and drawing, you see so much more. You experience the life of the place, you become part of it. Because of my constantly drawing in Venice and keeping notebooks, I feel that I understand what Canaletto was doing and experiencing with his drawings."

"On the other hand, being a print curator gives me amazing access to museum collections and original art objects. I learn so much. I do not feel unconnected from history, but rather part of a continuum. I don't try to emulate artists who have gone before or who are working now, but I certainly do measure myself against them."

"The Afro-Cuban group from the Santa Marta neighborhood (at the far, far end of Dorsoduro) is great fun. The idea of this nutty group of Rasta-haired Venetian guys singing topical songs in Venetian really appeals to me. I understand Venetian dialect and I follow the local issues that Venetians are concerned about. Santa Marta is probably the Bronx of Venice. Not the most elegant part of Venice but a great place to grow up."

"I have been a resident of Venice since 2004. For the past five years I have arranged my schedule so that I spend a full six months a year in Venice and a bit under six months in Des Moines. Approximately every two months, I go from one home and existence to the other. Sometimes I feel that I am living two completely different lives, but they are connected, and I love both of them."

"Since I am usually doing research on some aspect of the history of prints, I try to make appointments to visit the print rooms of museums in cities that I happen to visit. When we lived in London on a sabbatical in 1986-87, I enrolled in a year-long class to study lettering engraving at Sir John Cass College, City of London Polytechnic, a college that trained young engravers to pass the Guild exams and become certified engravers. I did this because I knew how to engrave pictorially, but had no sense of how to engrave words or inscriptions so I could print them. As an art historian, I had become curious about the extraordinary calligraphic inscription on an engraving of a Vanitas personification by the Dutch Mannerist engraver, Jan Saenredam. A curator friend at the British Museum suggested that I look at the British Library's collection of engraved calligraphy writing manuals from the 16th and 17th century. After years of research on what became an utterly absorbing topic for me, I ended up writing a long article about this subject (“Calligraphic Inscriptions in Dutch Mannerist Prints,” in Goltzius Studies: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1993). In addition to my art historical discoveries on this topic, I was able to incorporate the technical experience I had gained by studying lettering engraving."

"Sometimes work I have done as an artist gives me an idea for an exhibition, even though I can't incorporate that fact into what I write about it. For example, right now I am preparing the exhibition, Art in Ruins, for the Des Moines Art Center. But it is really my own experience of drawing in the wreckage of a relative's house destroyed by fire and making engravings of this, and witnessing a small plane crash and later engraving it, that made me interested in this subject."

"We have a boat, and my husband has become really good at rowing, Venetian-style. He goes out rowing almost every evening through the year, even around midnight. He rows through the canals late at night because there is almost no one else out at that hour. It is very dark on the inner canals, but it is an amazing thing to see Venice this way. Sometimes I go along as a passenger. I often take a notebook and draw while we go through the canals. The drawings have to be really fast since we are constantly moving. He is willing to stop and tie up every once in a while so I can make a drawing from a fixed spot."

"I began coming to Venice regularly in 1989, when Matilde Dolcetti, director of the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia (SIGV), a school of printmaking and graphic design, invited me to come to the school as a visiting artist. In subsequent years, I taught classes in burin engraving, drawing, and the history of prints there. My involvement with the SIGV connected me with the printmakers, book printers and bookbinders of Venice. Those artists became my core group of friends in Venice, and the SIGV has long been my base and point of reference."

"The Des Moines Art Center is an extraordinary institution with a terrific collection, a great work environment, and wonderful colleagues. I have an enviable work arrangement. I feel I still have something to contribute in the way of teaching about prints. So I will undoubtedly continue to commute from Venice to Des Moines for the foreseeable future"

"Here is a recent example of how curatorial travel influences my work as an artist: On January 21, the day after Barack Obama's inauguration, I flew to Washington DC on a courier trip. Walking up the hill past the US Capitol, I saw that it was still completely set up for the inauguration, but the two million people had all gone home. It was amazing to stand in that place on the day after the inauguration. After I did my research at the Library of Congress, I walked back down the hill, stood in front of the Capitol, and drew the scene. (To see the drawing, please click here.) The next day at 7 AM, I boarded an art shipper's truck at the National Gallery of Art and accompanied several paintings on a 19-hour ride back across the US to Des Moines."

"In Des Moines, we live on a quiet street in a beautiful old wooded neighborhood. Our house is surrounded by a large yard with three century-old oak trees, bushes, and perennials. I have my own study with all my print history books. My printmaking studio is in the basement of our house. I have a 36 x 60" American French Tool etching press. From 1970, when we moved to Des Moines after graduate school, until 1997 I worked primarily as an artist and a teacher of printmaking, design, and art history. In 1974, I began to curate exhibitions on the history of prints for the DMAC, then was invited to do projects for other museums. In 1997, after I had been doing guest curatorial projects for 20 years, the DMAC finally created my part-time position as curator of prints (now prints and drawings). My responsibilities at the museum include organizing three or four exhibitions a year on prints and drawings, writing gallery guides and labels, gallery talks, doing research on works in the permanent collection, recommending acquisitions, advising on conservation, working as part of the curatorial team, cultivating collectors and donors, etc. We don't have a public print room, so there is no public access to the collection. I am staff liaison for the Des Moines Art Center Print Club, a very active group of print collectors, artists, and people interested in prints. They organize monthly programs, commission prints, and purchase works for the collection."

"We live near Campo San Giacomo de l'Orio, in the sestiere of Santa Croce. Our palazzo is visible in Jacopo de' Barbari's 1500 bird's eye view of Venice. In the Campo, during the day the elderly sit on the benches under the trees, the retired men stand and chat, and friends meet to drink coffee, wine, and spritz at the cafés. In the afternoon, babies toddle, kids rollerblade and kick soccer balls, and parents chat. On Wednesday evenings, I often attend Incontri, a weekly gathering for artists only, organized by the painter Maria Morganti. We meet at the Fondazione Bevilacqua LaMasa on Rio San Barnaba. Artists present talks on their work to other artists."

"Sometimes, someone in Venice will ask me, "What is it like in Des Moines?", and sometimes, someone in Des Moines asks, "What is it like to live in Venice?" I respond with the same answer - You can't imagine. It is another world."

"The delight I take in crossing barriers and mixing things up may date from my experiences as a child. I grew up in The Bronx where I attended elementary and junior high school with many kids whose parents were WWII refugees. Many of my friends did not speak English at home. During the summers of 1959 and 1960, when I was 12 and 13, my father, a NYC school principal and science educator, taught National Science Foundation summer institutes for black science teachers at Virginia State College in Petersburg, VA. This was still the era of segregation, and we spent those two summers as the only white family living on the black college campus. As a teenager attending the High School of Music and Art, I absorbed the cultural richness, variety, and excitement of the city."

"In Venice, I work on my engravings on a big old oak kitchen table I bought for this purpose. The table has a very large drawer, a pullout board for rolling out pasta, and still has its pull out, meter-long rolling pin. For plate prep and proofing, I use the facilities at the Scuola di Grafica."

"I draw almost every day in drawing books made by a Venetian bookbinder, Renato Polliero, using an old pump fountain pen that I can fill with my own waterproof India ink. I love the flexibility of the point of a good old writing pen. For most of my life, I made drawings for completely private purposes and rarely showed or published them. They served only to generate ideas for my engravings. Since I started my drawing blog in 2006, I now draw also in order to share my images anonymously with the world on the Internet."

"My laptop computer is on a desk between my engraving table and the terrace door. There is a seven-hour time difference between Venice and Des Moines. Around 4 PM, as my colleagues are arriving at the Des Moines Art Center where it is 9 AM, I log in remotely to the museum's server. From Venice, I can literally work on the computer and printer on my desk in my office in Des Moines. Email is the same whether sent from the office next door or 6000 miles away. Work keeps going in Des Moines until around 5 PM, or midnight in Venice."

"When at the present day we approach such subjects we are met at every turn by the danger of falling into platitude and cant, and it would seem as if an entirely novel phraseology must be invented for the religious poetry and art of the future. Yet the sorrow is the same, and the hope the same, which mediaeval art symbolised by the archetypal forms of Genesis as by those beloved of Christ, and we do but wait for some sincere religious movement for a noble iconography to be again evolved, believing that Christianity is a storehouse, inexhaustible, of germs which it does but take successive intellectual atmospheres to develop."

"Porada, born in Vienna, fled Europe in 1938, after . One of the few things she brought with her to New York was the plate copy of her dissertation, complete with her drawings of seal impressions from European collections, which she presented to , ’s first director. In ancient , s — often carved with exquisitely detailed scenes — were used to roll the owner’s unique stamp onto a document produced by scribes, attesting to its authenticity."

", the capital of the dynasty since founded it, remains to be discovered."

"In the introductory essay, illustrated almost entirely with cylinders from the , Porada demonstrates how evidence derived from excavations post-dating the publication of her definitive catalogue of these seals (Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals, 1948) can refine our understaning of the , , and styles of ancient Near Eastern s generally and of the Morgan seals specifically. The text is studied with insights and lavishly annotated with references to works both recently published and forthcoming."

"As a rule s were perforated lengthwise, so that a wire or piece of string could be passed through the hole and then fastened to the necklace or wristband on which the seal was usually worn. Fairly often the seal-stones were set between caps of gold, silver, or copper."

"The downfall of the was brought about by the , a barbarous people who swept down from the northeastern mountains and subjugated the country in the twenty-second century As a result of the invasion, suffered a general disintegration. There were, however, a few centers of culture in which the standards set by the ns continued in force. One of these centers was . Here, under the later part of the Guti domination, reigned a priest-prince named whose statues show a technically proficient adherence to Akkad tradition."

"Major sculptures which first attracted the attention of the world's art lovers to the ancient Near East derive from the time of of , known to have been an elder contemporary of ..."

"Although the enthroned figure with its large head and sex organ defies identification, it is like figures shown—the other unidentified—in a yoga posture. On either side of the enthroned yogi and above his arms, a tiger and an elephant are on his right, a rhinoceros and buffalo on his left, and two antelopes are below, that is, in front of his throne. The composition of this steatite relief is hieratic. The horn-crowned and enthroned yogi forms an isosceles triangle whose axis connects the middle of the bifurcating horns, the long nose, and the erect phallus of the deity."

"The temple is the concrete shape (mūrti) of the Essence; as such it is the residence and vesture of God. The masonry is the sheath (kośa) and body. The temple is the monument of manifestation."