23 April 2014

'Great art has dreadful manners...'

Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in the headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to rearrange your sense of reality.
     ~ Simon Schama in 'The Power of Art', 2006.

David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio, 1610

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