Giotto Quotes

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

Pablo Picasso

Artist, Vanity, Greed

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In my opinion painters owe to Giotto, the Florentine painter, exactly the same debt they owe to nature, which constantly serves them as a model and whose finest and most beautiful aspects they are always striving to imitate and reproduce.

Giorgio Vasari

Beautiful, Debt, Opinion

Giorgio Vasari, George Bull (1978). “Artists of the Renaissance: a selection from Lives of the artists”, Viking Pr

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The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.

George Steiner

Art, Kings, Passion

"Real Presences". Book by George Steiner, 1986.

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Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.

Julio Cortazar

Wall, Memories, Thinking

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To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

Walter Darby Bannard

Art, Past, Yesterday

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It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

Jerry Saltz

Art, World, Cezanne

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The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

E. M. Forster

Men, Blue, Sky

E. M. Forster (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)”, p.361, Delphi Classics

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When I was taking art history I was always angry that we would skip certain chapters because "it wasn't important." Like, "Let's skip over the Japanese. Let's just get to Giotto, because that's where everything begins." It's like, no. Everything is relevant to me.

Ali Banisadr

Art, Important, Chapters

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

Robert Gober

Dream, Dog, Sex

Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Robert Gober, Cynthia Burlingham, Dave Hickey, Tullis Johnson (2009). “Heat waves in a swamp: the paintings of Charles Burchfield”, Prestel Pub

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