skopia
Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.
Not a single figure anywhere in it. Church painted this burning sky in 1860, and people have read the Civil War into it since.
Walking home from Hampstead at night, a drawing master meets a woman all in white escaped from an asylum. Collins tells it as sworn testimony, and Victorian England bought Woman in White perfume.
Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
Spartan girls taunt the boys into wrestling, and Degas made the bodies awkward rather than ideal, which is not how history painting was done.
Turgenev said this was the only work of his that still gave him pleasure. Vladimir, sixteen, loves the princess next door, twenty-one, and her secret lover is nobody he can fight.
Our chief want in life is, somebody who shall make us do what we can.
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.