Michelangelo Buonarroti on Art Including Painting and Sculpture

Michelangelo Buonarroti: Relative merits of painting and sculpture

" In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting."

Michelangelo Buonarroti: Genius and Sociability

" There are many who maintain a thousand lies, and one is that eminent painters are strange, harsh, and unbearable in their manner, although they are really human and humane. And these fools, and not sensible persons, consider them fantastic and capricious and are loath to tolerate such characteristics in a painter."

Michelangelo Buonarroti: The Difficulty of Ease

" ...that what one must toil and labor with hard work and study to attain in a painting is that, after much labor spent on it, it should seem to have been done almost rapidly and with no labor at all, although in fact it was not so. And this needs most excellent skill and art."

Source
Goldwater, R & Treves, M. 1976. Artists on Art, From the 14th to the 20th Century . John Murray.

Back to Words by Famous Artists main page