“…the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. … if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must … preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illumination.”

“Among the formative arts I would give the palm to painting: partly because it is the art of design and, as such, the groundwork of all the other formative arts; partly because it can penetrate much further into the region of ideas, and in conformity with them give a greater extension to the field of intuition that it is open to the others to do.

“The question within painting is not how – by some innocence of the eye that rules out mental activity – to locate the `given’ in experience but the much subtler question of how painting can achieve a triumphant humility in experience. Humility of this sort cannot be a passive virtue.”

“Within the history of art it is not hard to perceive a pervasive philosophical inquiry explored as it were in practice. Though it relates intimately to standard philosophical theorizing, it does not quite parallel it. Very skillful picture-making was in the sixteenth century as startling a new science as computers are now.”

“It is not clear that within the history of visual art the idea of innocence-in-experience is taken for granted, nor even that it is quite what philosophers take it to be. For a different concept of innocence in experience is not that of innocence devoid of interpretation, but rather of someone’s experience uncorrupted by an externally imposed conviction of what it is that experience `ought’ to be, as opposed to how honesty in observation should find it to be.”

“I’ve always felt that painting must awaken something even in the man who doesn’t ordinarily look at pictures, just as in Molière there is always something to make the very intelligent person laugh and also the person who understands nothing. In Shakespeare, too. And in my work, just as in Shakespeare, there are often burlesque things and relatively vulgar things. In that way I reach everybody.”

“There is something of philosophical importance at stake in pictorial achievements even if they are not – just because they are not – philosophy themselves. That is to say, the claim is not that such artworks are works of philosophy, or philosophy manqué, but that they embody a distinct form of aesthetic intelligibility, or an aesthetic way of rendering intelligible and compelling a variety of issues of the deepest importance to philosophy. The stronger claim would be that whatever makes art intelligible is something that is essential to philosophy but that philosophy itself cannot supply; the even stronger claim would be that art renders intelligible what philosophy tries to reveal but does so better.”

“There is a singular sense in which the child may peculiarly be said to be the father of the man. In many arts and attainments, the first and last stages of progress, the infancy and the consummation, have many features in common; while the intermediate stages are wholly unlike either and are farthest from the right. […] So it is in many matters of opinion. Our first and last coincide, though on different grounds; it is the middle stage which is farthest from the truth. Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble fingers, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain, which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.”

“For me the idea of realism in art is linked with aspiration towards the absolute, the moving force in the development of mankind. Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is a striving for the truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical”

“Our psychological models have been notoriously based on individual models of cognition […] But art is obviously interpretative and social in character, and that again gives it the opportunity to assume a larger role within the school. Art can dramatize what is true of the whole school curriculum: the curriculum is a matter of interpretation and is made possible only by an active social group that has a common culture.
Since this is obvious in the case of art, art education could be a leader in terms of changes in curriculum and instruction.”

„All encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event. ”

“The analysis and enactment of humanistic values transcends the reach of even individuals of genius. It requires what we might call, in the deepest sense, a conversazione.”

„If one looks at the origins of modern art history and art criticism, which are in the Renaissance, it is noticeable that really it arose out of conversation. The germ even of Vasari’s great Lives of the Artists lay in dinner conversations at Cardinal Farnese’s, as he says himself, and the most vigorous roots of his book run down to workshop argument, two or three centuries of it.
After all, why else than for dialogue do something as hard and as odd as attempting to verbalize about pictures? I shall claim inferential criticism is not only rational but sociable.”

„Since the power or the fecundity of works of art exceeds every positive causal or linear relation, it is not illegitimate for a layman such as myself, speaking from his memory of a few paintings and books, to express how painting enters into his reflections, and to register his sense of a profound dissonance, a transformation in the relationship between humanity and Being, when he holds up the universe of classical thought, contrasting it en bloc with the explorations of modern painting.”

“As for me, I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind, even though it happens that this art is pleasing to the uneducated as to the educated. It occurs rarely in any other art that what delights the experienced also moves the inexperienced.”