"As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to e…"

"In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate…"

"Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a ne…"

"Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal b…"

"Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to …"

"To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possib…"

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

"It is widely supposed that the naked human body is in itself an object upon which the eye dwells with pleasure and wh…"

"The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In a…"

"Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foresee…"