Ross King Quotes

#1. It's amazing - and poignant - to think that Leonardo (da Vinci)did consider himself as something of a failure. He didn't believe that he had achieved everything he might have done. His notebooks have a repeated refrain: 'Tell me if I ever did a thing.

Ross King

#2. Many of these omnibuses were driven, oddly enough, by male models who had retired from the business, which meant that Parisians of Manet's day were transported around the city by men who had once posed as valiant biblical heroes or the vindictive deities of classical mythology.

Ross King

#3. The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order "not to rule out our free will," he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is "the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.

Ross King

#4. Meissonier always spent many months researching his subject, finding out, for example, the precise sort of coats or breeches worn at the court of Louis XV, then hunting for them in rag fairs and market stalls or, failing that, having them specially sewn by tailors.

Ross King

#5. And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.

Ross King

#6. The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer.

Ross King

#7. The course of a person's life, like the course of a river, may likewise be changed by means of ingenious and timely precautions.

Ross King

#8. While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile.

Ross King

#9. You can see a zoomable sixteen-billion-pixel version on your home computer, an online visualization that its creators, Haltadefinizione, claim to be "the highest definition photograph ever in the world.

Ross King

#10. Manet nonetheless seems to have been captivated by her appearance, or at least by the visual possibilities of dressing her in exotic costumes and placing her in beguiling poses.

Ross King

#11. On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century

Ross King

#12. Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures.

Ross King

#13. Qualities that the world considers virtues will lead a leader to ruin, while those regarded as vices will often bring safety and prosperity. Good leadership requires a prince to "know how to do evil.

Ross King

#14. The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone's mind

Ross King

#15. That one of history's greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

Ross King

#16. The meaning of a particular action of the hand was understood only in terms of the positioning of the entire body, the facial expression, and the direction of the glance.

Ross King

#17. The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings - the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented - swiftly flamed out.

Ross King

#18. The word nepotism comes, in fact, from nipote, Italian for nephew.

Ross King

#19. There was nothing so dangerous to a king or an emperor as a book. Yes, a great library - a library as magnificent as this one - was a dangerous arsenal, one that kings and emperors feared more than the greatest army or magazine.

Ross King

#20. Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.

Ross King

#21. In fact, the figure in The Last Supper is not a woman: only the most partisan reading can place Mary Magdalene in the scene. Viewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have read the painting quite differently.

Ross King