Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.

Kenneth Clark

Categorized in : Long Drama May

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.

Kenneth Clark

ignorance men believe

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.

Kenneth Clark

unstable civil-rights prejudice

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

Kenneth Clark

damage racist humans

The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources.

Kenneth Clark

luxury justice america

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

Kenneth Clark

treated ifs children

The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.

Kenneth Clark

ghetto educational dark

Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.

Kenneth Clark

passion expression animal

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

Kenneth Clark

energy giving art

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

Kenneth Clark

analogies eye looks

Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.

Kenneth Clark

diversity political justice

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

Kenneth Clark

erotic judgement art

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Kenneth Clark

hurt kindness believe

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.

Kenneth Clark

too-late people thinking

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

Kenneth Clark

style kind age

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

Kenneth Clark

destroyed pride humility

In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

Kenneth Clark

stupid war country

The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.

Kenneth Clark

simple believe art

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

Kenneth Clark

tolerate company hero

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

Kenneth Clark

leonardo drawing said

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

Kenneth Clark

agency creative ideas