"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."

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

"No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only …"

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