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Classicism Quotes

Browse 30 quotes about Classicism.

Classicism Quotes

“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”

ArtCensorshipRenaissanceAristocracyClassicismPolitic
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“But the Scottish patron on tour took home with him from Italy much more than his cargo of paintings, sculptures and antique marbles, the tangible souvenirs of his excursion to the south. He took home as well a sophistication of taste and an appreciation of the virtues of classicism which only contact with the Mediterranean inheritance could impart. Only sixty years before the building of the pedimented façade of Duff House in Banff, with its urns and roof-line statuary more in keeping with a southern sky, the typical laird's house in Scotland was still inspired by an economy of display and a strength of fabric deriving from less settled times. The 18th century saw the transportation to Scotland of the idea of the Italian palace, and Hopetoun or Floors or Chatelherault owe their existence to this inspiration.”

ItalyClassicismGrand TourLairdsScottish ArchitectureDuff House
Book:Scots in Italy in the 18th Century
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“Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.”

MankindManSatireRoyaltyKingClassicismTwainTrampMarktwain
Book:A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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“Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how much out of the way we live. 'Neither by land nor sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans': Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill—from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which 'forgives' everything because it 'Understands' everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ...We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality—was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'.... There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark—for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal...”

ModernityNihilismFatalityClassicismHellenicHyperboreans
Book:Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
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“It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.”

MaterialismApolloNietzscheLife AffirmingClassicismBirth Of TragedyDionyosLife DenyingTwilight Of The Idols
Book:Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
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“As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you makes your choice!” That may be the most American sentence ever written.”

American HistoryAmericansU S HistoryClassicism
Book:First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
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“Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin. It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed - in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.”

GodReligionRomanticismClassicism
Author:T. E. Hulme
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“Rubaiyat Revină-n glasul meu persanul vers Spre a ne aminti că timpul-i un divers Mod de-a urzi avide visuri vane, În taine risipite-n univers. Din nou să spună că țărână-i focul, Țărână-i trupul, și că asta-i jocul: Viața mea și-a ta sunt râu ce curge Necontenit și repede-n tot locul. Și că impunătorul monument Zidit cu trudă, din trufie, lent, Un vânt fugar e numai, că-n lumina Lui Dumnezeu un veac e un moment. ... Te rog, persană lună, să revii, Și voi, incerte-apusuri aurii. Azi e ieri. Nu ește decât ceilalți. Tărână-i chipul lor. Cu morții-învii.”

PoetryStoicismBorgesClassicismOmar Khayyam
Author:Jorges Luis Borges
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“The shortness of High Renaissance is typical of the fate of all the periods of classical style in modern times; since the end of feudalism the epochs of stability have been nothing but short episodes. The rigorous formalism of the High Renaissance has certainly remained a constant temptation for later generations, but, apart from short, mostly sophisticated, and educationally inspired movements, it has never prevailed again. On the other hand, it has proved to be the most important undercurrent in modern art; for even though the strictly formalistic style, based on the typical and the normative, was unable to hold its own against the fundamental naturalism of the modern age, nevertheless, after the Renaissance, a return to the incoherent, cumulative, co-ordinating formal methods of the Middle Ages was no longer possible. Since the Renaissance we think of a work of painting or sculpture as a concentrated picture of reality seen from a single and uniform point of view - a formal structure that arises from the tension between the wide world and the undivided subject opposed to the world. This polarity between art and the world was mitigated from time to time, but never again abolished. It represents the real inheritance of Renaissance.”

NaturalismClassicismUndercurrentHigh Renaissance
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“Despite all the positive psychological attributes of hatred we have outlined, hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth, even as they apply to himself and to his fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating.”

LoveHateJesusJusticePowerSocial JusticeDiscriminationPowerlessPowerlessnessClassicism
Book:Jesus and the Disinherited
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“A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.”

WorldMindArtCountryStatesAgeProcessSecurityStyleConstantSatisfactionArtisticFixedTemperClassicism
Book:Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
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“Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.”

OrderSourceBalanceClarityGreekProportionSparesEgyptAbstractionEleganceReductionStarksSimplificationClassicismCondensation
Book:Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
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“Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries - or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.”

ShouldTwoAgeFoundHouseMy OwnCasesCenturySilentCoffeeFancyHallsOutsidersRefugeShould IUnfortunateHeresyThamesClassicismCoffee Houses
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.”

ThinkingLooksSoulLastsMotherDesireDiesCultureWishLosesCommonEffortHalfDarknessSuccessfulFireChildhoodDyingCreationProduceColdCivilizationGravesDawnGrayRomeWearyWombReluctantRomanticismDaylightClassicism
Book:The decline of the West
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“However much the various phases of the French Revolution may have modelled themselves on Roman history the early phase on Republican virtue, the later on Imperial grandeur the fact remains that classicism depended on a fixed and rational philosophy; whereas the spirit of the Revolution was one of change and of emotion.”

MayPhilosophyFactsSpiritEmotionVirtueRevolutionRepublicanRemainsVariousRationalFixedPhasesGrandeurFrench RevolutionClassicism
Book:The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art
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“The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.”

KindChildrenLittlesLongMadeLyingChoicesGrowsGrowing UpDoorsHairBedRegardSpreadTemptationAweNeighborhoodWeedCandleLong AgoCarpetPillowGarmentsRomanticismDaylightClawsRustGownsSproutsFingernailsRecluseDerisionClassicism
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“As I see it, all of them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists, and the rest - are only part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there's an Informel element in Beuys, as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists. The Informel is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism - the age of kings, or clearly formed hierarchies.”

ThinkingWellsArtAgeActionArtistChanceQualityMovementKingsElementsOppositesPainterHierarchyImpressionistsClassicism
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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