Leon Battista Alberti Quotes
Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.
A common error of ignorance is to maintain that what one does not know does not exist.
No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.
It is very rarely granted even to Nature herself to produce anything absolutely perfect in every part.
We must always take from nature what we paint and always choose the most beautiful things.
There is no art which has not had its beginnings in things full of errors. Nothing is at the same time both new and perfect.
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.
I would have artists be convinced that the supreme skill and art in painting consists in knowing how to use black and white... because it is light and shade that make objects appear in relief.
The function of the painter is to render... the visible surface so that at a certain distance... and position it appears... like the body itself.
It was never shameful to learn from any teacher things that are useful to know.
Practice by drawing things large, as if equal in representation and reality. In small drawings every large weakness is easily hidden; in the large, the smallest weakness is easily seen.
Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.
Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.
I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.
What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?
Painting is possessed of divine power, for not only does it make the absent present, but also makes the dead almost alive.
The picture will have charm when each color is very unlike the one next to it.
Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
Beauty - the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
