Sixteenth of September, 1956

One evening, when I was a little boy, I realized that the most beautiful image I had ever seen was the bright shape of the moon transpiring from behind the dark branches of an old tree.

~ Rene Magritte

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Agostino Arrivabene

 

 

“Leonardo’s type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number that it delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and sacred wisdom. […] What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan. […] Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light or eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.”

“Nervous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, these people seem to be subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences. […] It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

“The Mona Lisa is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her.”

“Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art really begins and ends. […] The name of Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of over-much science.”

~ “The Renaissance: studies in art and poetry”, Walter Pater.

Chute des anges rebelles

~ Frères Limbourg, “Très riches heures du duc de Berry”, 1411-16.

“Chi più in alto sale, più lontano vede. Chi più lontano vede, più a lungo sogna.” ~ Walter Bonatti

Jacob Böhme

 

National Gallery Berlin

And also: “Cabin covered in snow”, Friedrich. “After the rain”, Baum. “Low country at the Rhine”, Thoma.

“Bastava il nuovo sogno, bastava la nuova, rinnovata brama per rendere sopportabile l’esistenza, per conferirle qualcosa di simile a un senso, per illuminarla e redimerla. Gli amici di Albert, perlomeno quelli che ancora gli restavano, non comprendevano molto bene queste sue fantasie. Di una cosa pero’ s’avvedevano, ed era che Albert viveva sempre piu’ chiuso in se stesso, che parlava sempre piu’ tra se’ e sorrideva in maniera sempre piu’ strana, che era lontanissimo, non partecipava affatto a cio’ che per altri e’ caro e importante, si asteneva dalla politica e dai traffici, non partecipava a gare di tirassegno e a balli, a dotte conversazioni sull’arte, in una parola a nulla di cio’ che prima gli dava gioia. Era divenuto un eccentrico, un mezzo matto, capace di andarsene a passeggiare in una grigia, fredda giornata d’inverno, respirando gli odori e i colori dell’aria gelida, di star dietro a un bambino capace solo di balbettii, di rimanere per ore a fissare un’acqua verde, un’aiuola fiorita, oppure di sprofondare, come un lettore nel proprio libro, nelle linee che scorgeva in un peszetto fi legno tagliato, in una radice o in un tubero. Nessuno piu’ si interessava a lui, che all’epoca viveva in una cittadina straniera.” ~ Hesse