"Sistine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the qualities in which Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin's magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to wish one's self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... "spirit" of the characters that we know as Micawber, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep—is it Dickens, or have each of these characters a personal spirit, independent of their creator? Have the Venus of Medici, the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvidere, spirits and reality of their own, or do they represent the spiritual and mental power of their creators? The Law of Paradox explains that both propositions are true, viewed from the proper ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he observed that his cousin Olive had as many German ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... taken to the Sistine Chapel, of course," he went on, "and to the loggia and Bramant's staircase? You saw ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... degree than ourselves by this simple and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter one another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of English ladies (for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week) will be satisfied that their belligerent propensities are kept in abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the part of society. It requires a vast deal of refinement to spiritualize their large physical endowments. Such being the case with the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Salviati; although it is true that it was brought to completion by Pietro himself. The same Rocco painted many pictures of Our Lady, and made many portraits, of which there is no need to speak; I will only say that in the Sistine Chapel in Rome he painted portraits of Girolamo Riario and of F. Pietro, Cardinal of San Sisto. Another disciple of Pietro was Montevarchi, who painted many pictures in San Giovanni di Valdarno; more particularly, in the Madonna, the stories ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the famous and wonderful pictures now foiling and dwarfing one another in our vulgar galleries, distributed over the Western world. I wish their enfranchisement. Each great picture should be given a room to itself, like the Sistine Madonna, not only a room but a temple like that of the Iverskaya at Moscow, not only a temple but a fair populous province. The great pictures should be objects of pilgrimages, and their temples places of prayer. In the galleries, as is obvious, the pictures ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... repose, and the fatigue of enjoying is greater than the enjoyment itself. To hear again, years afterward, an old melody, every note of which we supposed we had forgotten, and yet to recognize it as an old acquaintance; or, after the lapse of many years, to stand once more before the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, and experience afresh all the emotions which the infinite look of the child aroused in us for years; or to smell a flower or taste a dish again which we have not thought of since childhood—all these produce such an intense charm that we do not know ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... already advanced in his art in those days is borne out by the fact that only ten years later (1481) he was summoned by Pope Sixtus to Rome, to decorate, in the company of the great Florentine masters—Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Rosselli, and Botticelli—the walls of the "Sistine" Chapel in fresco. Prior to this great commission, Milanesi notes (1475) frescoes painted by him in the great hall of the Perugian Palazzo Pubblico, which have entirely disappeared, and others (1478) in a chapel at Cerqueto, of which only a "St. Sebastian," very ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... His compositions, of which very few have been published, were very favourable specimens of the severe ecclesiastical style; one in particular, a ten-part Miserere, composed for Holy Week in 1821 by order of Pope Pius VII., has taken a permanent place in the services of the Sistine chapel during Passion Week. Baini held a higher place, however, as a musical critic and historian than as a composer, and his Life of Palestrina (Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Academy of San Luca, with Minardi at its head, unanimously decided in its favor. In fact, it contains a grandeur and sublimity which could be ascribed to nobody but the author of the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. An antique repose is displayed in the whole work, perfectly agreeing with the character of the lady as described by Michel Angelo, and which suits the advanced age at which she is painted. The execution is ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... these pictures is like Raphael's Sistine Madonna in the Dresden gallery; it is in a room by itself. One enters with a holy hush over his spirit, and, with awe in his eyes, looks at Jesus in Gethsemane. There is the Kidron brook, the gentle rise of ground, the ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... time, he engaged a tutor, Father Calvi. This was an old man, with a mind and faith exceedingly serene. He loved art beyond everything. I believe religion even reacted upon him through its beauty. In the galleries before the old masters, or listening to the music in the Sistine Chapel, he lost himself altogether. There was nothing pagan in these feelings, as they were not based upon sybaritism or sensual enjoyment. Father Calvi loved art with the pure, serene feeling as maybe a Da Fiesole, a Cimabue, or Giotto loved it. And ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... from Sixtus the Fourth, as has been said, and is usually, but not correctly, spelled 'Sistine.' The library was founded by Nicholas the Fifth, whose love of books was almost equal to his passion for building. The galleries are representative of Raphael's work, which predominates to such an extent that the paintings of almost all other artists are of secondary importance, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty, was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic in painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel which exhibits the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He has personated motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied sentiment on the monuments of St Lorenzo; unraveled the features of meditation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... not wonder that Hazel lingered with delight over these or over the groups by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel,—the quiet pendentives, where the waiting of the world for its salvation was typified in the dream-like, reclining forms upon the still, desert sand; or the wonderful scenes from the "Creation,"—the majestic "Let ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the latter [Dante] influenced his feelings. The Demons in the Last Judgment ... may find a prototype in La Divina Comedia. The figures rising from the grave mark his study of L'Inferno, e Il Purgatorio; and the subject of the Brazen Serpent, in the Sistine Chapel, must remind every reader of Canto XXV. dell' Inferno."—Life of Michael Angelo by ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... may be tolerably given by single lines in a drawing. Remember, therefore, for a moment—as characteristic of culminating Italian art—Michael Angelo's fresco of the "Temptation of Eve," in the Sistine chapel, and you will be more interested in seeing the birth of Italian art, illustrated by the same subject, from St. Ambrogio, of Milan, the "Serpent beguiling Eve." [Footnote: This cut is ruder ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the Aeneid of Virgil from beginning to end, containing nearly nine thousand lines. Mozart, upon hearing the Miserere of Allegri played in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, only once, went to his hotel, and wrote it all down ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediaeval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys' voices. Isaiah mentions the custom (Ivi. 3-6). Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), "such men as attend women and have no need of women," i.e., "have no natural ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... prepare the cartoons for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Space forbids me to attempt any description of these, but the story of their completion as related by Vasari can hardly be omitted. "When half of them were nearly finished," he says, "Pope Julius, who had gone more than once ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... elements of his art most easily lending themselves to exaggeration. That the master did indeed permit himself to be carried beyond due limits in these matters is seen by comparing the grandeur of the Sistine ceiling with the mannerisms of the Last Judgment. The interval between was "the time of his best technical and spiritual creativeness," when he produced the statues of the ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... take this down," she said, as if apologising more to herself than Ted, "because I want to hang my large photo of the Sistine Madonna ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... see from the terror in the boy's eyes and quivering lips, that, Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it looks upon to stone; and the wings of Love are rent and crushed. Except on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, there are perhaps few paintings to compare with this in intensity of strength and in marvel of conception. It is worthy to rank with Michael Angelo's God Dividing ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... you quiver, in Dresden, before the San Sisto, carried away by those divine eyes of the "Mother of Eternity," or rent with sorrow before the solemn eyes of the Child? Is this enough to fill you with tears of delight when you enter the Sistine Chapel and see St. John as he kneels with his unshed tears about the dead Christ? What is there wanting in the touch of your artist? There is wanting genius; there is wanting life. Or to take one instance more. You ask somebody to teach you sculpture, to tell you how to make ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... College of the Roratists, [FOOTNOTE: The duties of these singers were to sing Rorate masses and Requiem masses for the royal family. Their name was derived from the opening word of the Introit, "Rorate coeli."] the Polish Sistine Chapel, attached to the Cracow Cathedral. It was founded in 1543 and subsisted till 1760. With the fifteenth of seventeen conductors of the college, Gregor Gorczycki, who died in 1734, passed away the last of the classical school of Polish ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... large life-giving loveliness, and its sweet dignity, the embodiment of the highest type of womanhood. In another corner stood a similar reduction of the Flying Mercury. Between the bookcases and over the mantel-piece hung prints;—most noticeable among them, Steinla's engraving of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and Toschi's reproduction, in lines, of the luminous majesty of Correggio's St. Peter and St. Paul; and these were but specimens of the treasures inclosed in a huge portfolio that stood where the light fell favorably upon it. Opposite Grey's chair, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... masterpieces we experience that mental sensation which Longinus declares to be the test of true sublimity, to wit, our mind "undergoes a kind of proud elation and delight, as if it had itself begotten the thing we read." We are disposed by such literature very much as we are disposed by the Sistine Madonna or before the Aphrodite of Melos. Things like these exert a sort of overmastering power upon us. Our craving for perfection, for ideal beauty, is for once wholly gratified. Our spirit glows with an intense and complete satisfaction. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... if that were the only product of his chisel. What he did later was the fulfillment of the prophecy embodied in the Mask. At the age of eighty, he produced the Descent from the Cross, which glorifies the Duomo in Florence. In between these productions, we find his David, his Moses, the Sistine Ceiling, with many others scarcely less notable. He rose to a higher and higher conception of art as he lived art more and more fully, and his execution kept pace with the expansion of his conception. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... their philosophical conception of man's religious development might include all expressions of that for which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester, Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... disappointed that he had not been able to confer the hand of Olympia on the king, was increasingly desirous of investing the members of his family with all possible eclat. He had imported for the occasion the principal members of the Pope's choir. These wonderful vocalists from the Sistine Chapel astonished the French court with melody and harmony such as had never been heard in the ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... on their journey south through Italy. They reached Rome during Holy Week, and learned that the celebrated music of the "Miserere" was being given in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. It was very difficult to gain admittance to the Chapel, as the Pope and many of the Cardinals were there. The rich dress of the two visitors, the German they spoke, and the singular air of authority which the boy showed, convinced ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the well-known Latin hymn on the Crucifixion, is one of the most familiar numbers in the Roman Missal. It is appointed to be sung at High Mass on the Friday in Passion Week, and also on the third Sunday in September. On Thursday in Holy Week it is also sung in the Sistine Chapel as an Offertorium. The poem was written by the monk Jacobus de Benedictis in the thirteenth century, and is regarded as one of the finest of mediaeval sacred lyrics. Grove says of it: "Several readings are ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... materially assisted in your preparation for the schools either of philosophy or divinity by Raphael's 'School of Athens,' by Raphael's 'Theology,'—or by Michael Angelo's 'Judgment.' My task, to-day, is to set before you some part of the design of the first Master of the works in the Sistine Chapel; and I believe that, from his teaching, you will, even in the hour which I ask you now to give, learn what may be of true use to you in all your future labor, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... The Raphael in the Dresden gallery. The Sistine Madonna, the most famous picture of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael—used to come here to study, and thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most important art-buildings in the world;—the others being, Arena Chapel, Padua, where are Giotto's frescoes; Sistine Chapel, Rome, where are Michael Angelo's greatest paintings; and Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, which is filled with ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese porcelain into fragments ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... was the representation, during Holy Week, of the Passion of our Lord. To this day we have interesting relics of this custom, such as the Oberammergau play in South Bavaria, the performances in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and in some parts of Spain. The oldest Protestant composition on this subject was ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... explaining historically larger subsequent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness in themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable artistic qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its best—the Parthenon—no less than to the art of the Renaissance at its best— the Sistine Chapel—the more instructive light would be derived rather from what precedes than what follows such central success, from the determination to apprehend the fulfilment of past effort rather than the eve of decline, in the critical, central moment which partakes ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater |
