Architects From Italy

"Aulenti views architecture as a concrete, untouchable entity that uses the city as its form generator. She sees architecture in terms of its relationship to the urban environment. In her designs, she blends the private with the public to generate architectural forms and spatial relationships."

"Raggi: Has the fact that you are a woman been a crucial influence in your work? Aulenti: Yes."

"The conscious principle in this design has been to achieve forms that could create experiences, and that could at the same time welcome everyone's experiences with the serenity of an effortless development."

"When you're criticized for something, it's best to wait two or three years and see."

"Advice to whoever asks me how to make a home is to not have anything, just a few shelves for books, some pillows to sit on. And then, to take a stand against the ephemeral, against passing trends [...] and to return to lasting values."

"There are plenty of other talented female architects, but most of them seem to link up with men [...] I've always worked for myself, and it's been quite an education. Women in architecture must not think of themselves as a minority, because the minute you do, you become paralyzed. It is important to never create the problem."

"What is more real and tangible within an artificial space than brick?"

"It's not possible to define a style in my work. If you're designing an airport, then aeroplanes are important. It's no more complicated to design a museum. I prefer museums for my personal passion – the art."

"I am convinced that architecture is tied to the polis, it is an art of the city, of the foundation, and as such it is necessarily related and conditioned by the context in which it is born. Place, time, and culture create that architecture, instead of another."

"Light is impressionism."

"Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!"

"No one who has not seen the Sistine Chapel can have a clear idea of what a human being can achieve. ... The master's inner security and strength, his greatness is beyond all description. ... At the moment I am so engrossed by Michelangelo that even Nature makes no appeal to me, for my vision is so small compared with his. If there were only some means of fixing such pictures in one's soul!"

"To make something is to invent or discover it. Michelangelo cuts away the extra marble that hides the statue, right?"

"If one day, reasoning absurdly, Michelangelo's belonging to Freemasonry were to emerge, then should that wonder of the Last Judgment be hidden inside the Sistine Chapel? Or, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, the Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie?"

"What do you despise? By this you are truly known."

"Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti."

"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all."

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

"If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius."

"Ancora Imparo."

"Do we not say that the judicious discovering of a most lovely Statua in a piece of Marble, hath sublimated the wit of Buonarruotti far above the vulgar wits of other men? And yet this work is onely the imitation of a meer aptitude and disposition of exteriour and superficial mem­bers of an immoveable man; but what is it in comparison of a man made by nature, composed of as many exteriour and inte­riour members, of so many muscles, tendons, nerves, bones, which serve to so many and sundry motions? but what shall we say of the senses, and of the powers of the soul, and lastly, of the understanding? May we not say, and that with reason, that the structure of a Statue falls far short of the formation of a living man, yea more of a contemptible worm?"

"...he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint."

"Who can measure the worth of a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo or Beethoven in dollars and cents?"

"Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in Aristotle's "substance", Descartes' "machine of nature," Newtonian "force" and "attraction," Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses , they may become metaphors. There are no metaphors per se...."

"A quel pietoso fonte, onde siam tutti, S'assembra ogni beltà che qua si vede, Più c'altra cosa alle persone accorte;"

"As when, O lady mine, With chiseled touch The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mold, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows."

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

"Beauty is the purgation of superfluities."

"Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you … It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old … That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will.""

"I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop."

"Recollect that trifles make perfection, and that perfection is no trifle."

"Interviewer: The examination of two emotional journeys, namely those concerning the artist's relationships with Tommaso de' Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, proved to be very interesting. Graziella Magherini: Buonarroti dedicated some very beautiful sonnets to Tommaso, written in the Neoplatonic style, with a refined sensitivity that was an integral part of Florentine Humanism. However, psychoanalytic observation reveals clear homoerotic feelings, albeit disguised. The comparison with the drawings that the artist gave to the young man is extraordinary. I am referring to The Rape of Ganymede, The Punishment of Titus and The Bacchanalia of the Putti. These are truly eloquent works. There are two versions of ‘Ganymede’: in the first, Ganymede resists Zeus in an ambivalent mix of desire and fear, while in the second he offers himself in sweet abandon, in an attitude pervaded by ecstasy and bliss. In The Punishment of Titus, the protagonist, struck by the eagle, becomes a metaphor for Michelangelo's sense of guilt. But even more extraordinary is the drawing with the Bacchanalia of the Putti. Here we are faced with an expression of regressed levels. Naked children linger in bacchanalia, dragging a dead deer here, carrying a pig there; a child urinates in a wine jug; young people are lost, without dignity... In the lower part of the work, the contrast is striking. There is a naked man sleeping uncovered, in an atmosphere of profound sadness, in a pose that closely resembles, for example, the Drunken Moses in the istine Chapel; and there is a hideous female satyr with flaccid breasts. What emerges clearly is a depressed paternal role on the one hand, and a sense of emptied motherhood on the other, in an almost phallic mother figure that combines the male and female roles. In short, the drawings are direct, sensorial: unlike the sonnets, which, as I mentioned, also contain an underlying materiality of the flesh."

"The properties of the air are such that it may become condensed or rarefied."

"That part of the air which is nearest to the wing which presses on it, will have the greatest density."

"No impetus created by any movement whatever can be immediately consumed, but if it finds an object which has a great resistance it consumes itself in a reflex movement."

"The function which the wing performs against the air when the air is motionless is the same as that of the air moved against the wings when these are without motion."

"The air which is struck with most swiftness by the movable thing is compressed to the greatest degree in itself."

"It is always the under side of the branches of any plant that show themselves to the wind which strikes it, and one leans against the other."

"Impetus is a power of the mover applied in a movable thing which causes the movable thing to move after it is separated from its mover."

"If you take as your pattern the wings of feathered birds, these are more powerful in structure of bone and sinew because they are penetrable, that is to say the feathers are separated from one another and the air passes through them. But the bat is aided by its membrane, which binds the whole together and is not penetrated by the air."

"Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat, because its membranes serve as an armour or rather as a means of building together the pieces of its armour, that is the framework of the wings."

"You will perhaps say that the sinews and muscles of a bird are incomparably more powerful than those of a man... But the reply to this is that such great strength gives it a reserve of power beyond what it ordinarily uses..."

"A bird makes the same use of wings and tail in the air as a swimmer does of his arms and legs in the water."

"Since the wings are swifter to press the air than the air is to escape from beneath the wings the air becomes condensed and resists the movement of the wings; and the motive power of these wings by subduing the resistance of the air raises itself in a contrary movement to the movement of the wings."

"Every body that is moved continues to move so long as the impression of the force of its mover is retained in it, therefore the movement of this wing with violence... will come to move the whole bird with it until the impetus of the moved air has been consumed."

"Swimming upon water teaches men how birds do upon the air."

"Painting is concerned with all the ten attributes of sight, namely darkness and brightness, substance and colour, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest; and it is with these attributes that this my small book will be woven, recalling to the painter by what rules and in what way he ought by his art to imitate all things that are the work of nature and the adornment of the world."

"He who does not value life does not deserve it."

"The water which rises in the mountain is the blood which keeps the mountain in life."

"Nature is full of infinite causes which were never set forth in experience."