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Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson Quotes

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Famous Walter Isaacson Quotes

“When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio's studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the 'modern manner' in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato 'Leonardo's famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.' The term 'sfumato' derives from the Italian word for 'smoke,' or more precisely the dissipation and gradual vanishing of smoke into thin air . . . With no sharp lines, enigmatic glances and smiles can flicker mysteriously.”

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Book:Leonardo da Vinci
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“Chiaroscuro, from the Italian for 'light/dark,' is the use of contrasts of light and shadow as a modeling technique for achieving the illusion of plasticity and three-dimensional volume in a two-dimensional drawing or painting. Leonardo's version of the technique involved varying the darkness of a color by adding black pigments rather than making it a more saturated or richer hue.”

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Book:Leonardo da Vinci
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“I think America is really well-positioned, because we do train people to be creative and sometimes resist authority, which helps in being an innovator. I think you're going to see for the next phase of the revolution all sorts of wonderful ways of connecting art and literature and journalism into new forms of digital expression.”

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Author:Walter Isaacson
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“So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

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Book:Steve Jobs
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“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”

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Author:Walter Isaacson
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