Ross King > Quotes

“And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“There was nothing so dangerous to a king or an emperor as a book. Yes, a great library—a library as magnificent as this one—was a dangerous arsenal, one that kings and emperors feared more than the greatest army or magazine.”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“Quite amazing how determined kings and emperors have been to destroy books. But civilization is built on such desecrations, is it not? Justinian the Great burned all of the Greek scrolls in Constantinople after he codified the Roman law and drove the Ostrogoths from Italy. And Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China, the man who unified the five kingdoms and built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed.”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“Qualities that the world considers virtues will lead a leader to ruin, while those regarded as vices will often bring safety and prosperity. Good leadership requires a prince to “know how to do evil.”
― Ross King, Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power

“In fact, the figure in The Last Supper is not a woman: only the most partisan reading can place Mary Magdalene in the scene. Viewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have read the painting quite differently.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“The course of a person’s life, like the course of a river, may likewise be changed by means of ingenious and timely precautions.”
― Ross King, Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power

“That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“Let no one read my principles who is not a mathematician,” he famously declared (less famous is the fact that the principles he was referring to were his theories of how the aortic pulmonary valve worked). Ironically, he himself was a poor mathematician, often making simple mistakes. In one of his notes he counted up his growing library: “25 small books, 2 larger books, 16 still larger, 6 bound in vellum, 1 book with green chamois cover.” This reckoning (with its charmingly haphazard system of classification) adds up to fifty, but Leonardo reached a different sum: “Total: 48,” he confidently declared.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings—the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented—swiftly flamed out.”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for “God, eternity, the years of God which fail not.”25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and “if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them.”26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child’s right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“Such artistic forays into the countryside had been made easier by the invention, in 1824, of metal tubes for oil paints, which replaced the messy and awkward pig bladders in which artists of previous generations had kept their paints; and by the introduction of collapsible three-legged stools and portable easels, both of which could be carried into the countryside by the artist.18”
― Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism

“The word nepotism comes, in fact, from nipote, Italian for nephew.”
― Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

“Every person wishes to know of the proposals, the learned, and the ignorant. The learned understands the work proposed-he understands at least something, partly, or fully-but the ignorant and inexperienced understand nothing, not even when things are explained to them. Their ignorance moves them promptly to anger. They remain in ignorance because they want to show themselves learned, which they are not, and they move the other ignorant crowd to insistence on its own poor waysand to scorn for those who know.”
― Ross King

“Leonardo’s twenty-six-year-old father, Ser Piero, was (as his honorary title implied) a notary: someone who wrote wills, contracts, and other commercial and legal correspondence. The family had produced notaries for at least five generations, but with Leonardo the chain was to snap. He was, as his grandfather’s tax return stated a few years later, “non legittimo”—born out of wedlock—and as such he (along with criminals and priests) was barred from membership in the Guild of Judges and Notaries. Leonardo’s mother was a sixteen-year-old girl named Caterina, and an apparent difference in their social status meant she and Piero, a bright and ambitious young man, did not marry. Almost”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“…Because every ruler celebrated his conquests by setting torch to the nearest library. Did not Julius Caesar incinerate the scrolls in the great library at Alexandria during his campaign against the republicans in Africa? Or General Stilicho, leader of the Vandals, order the burning of the Sybillene prophecies in Rome?”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“King Alfonso liked to claim, in a paraphrase of Plato, that “kings ought to be learned men themselves, or at least lovers of learned men.”16 His nickname, Il Magnanimo, owed much to his generous literary patronage. His personal emblem was an open book, while his punning motto was Liber sum (which meant both “I am free” and “I am a book”).”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“At times Leonardo was troubled by his lack of achievement. As a young man he appears to have developed a reputation for melancholia. “Leonardo,” wrote a friend, “why so troubled?” A sad refrain runs through his notebooks: “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he often sighs. Or in another place: “Tell me if ever I did a thing.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order “not to rule out our free will,” he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is “the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.”
― Ross King, Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power

“The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer.”
― Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

“With him were Marshal Patrice MacMahon, a hero of the Crimean War, and 100,000 troops.* MacMahon was promptly wounded in the leg by Prussian gunfire. He turned over his command to Général Ducrot, who, realizing that the hills surrounding Sedan would make excellent emplacements for the deadly Prussian cannons, uttered the memorable words: "We're in a chamberpot and about to be shat upon."29 It was a statement displaying a foresight thitherto alien to the French military command.”
― Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism

“You can see a zoomable sixteen-billion-pixel version on your home computer, an online visualization that its creators, Haltadefinizione, claim to be “the highest definition photograph ever in the world.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“It’s amazing — and poignant — to think that Leonardo (da Vinci)did consider himself as something of a failure. He didn’t believe that he had achieved everything he might have done. His notebooks have a repeated refrain: 'Tell me if I ever did a thing.”
― Ross King

“Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Italians had a “national peculiarity” to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“For a Latin work from ancient Rome to survive the next few centuries and beyond, it therefore needed to be transferred to parchment. But this conversion from roll to codex was reliant on the early Christians—the people who made the codices—deeming the writings of their pagan predecessors worthy of preservation and study.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Many of these omnibuses were driven, oddly enough, by male models who had retired from the business, which meant that Parisians of Manet's day were transported around the city by men who had once posed as valiant biblical heroes or the vindictive deities of classical mythology.”
― Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism

“Machiavelli’s second metaphor alludes to the fact that Fortune was always seen as a feminine force. Like any woman, she responds best, he believes, to rough handling. He argues that in dealings with Fortune it is advisable to act impetuously “because Fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.” However disagreeable the image, it is worth remembering that gendered interpretations of philosophical conceptions have a lengthy history, and that Machiavelli elsewhere speaks of winning over Fortune by means of friendship and harmonious action. The idea of battering Fortune into submission did not, in fact, originate with Machiavelli. Seventy years earlier, in Somnium de Fortuna (The Dream of Fortune), Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini had Fortune claim she despised those who “run away from me” and favored “those who put me to flight.” The upshot, at any rate, is that one can manage the caprice of Fortune—a comforting philosophy for the former Second Chancellor to contemplate from his lonely exile in the Albergaccio.”
― Ross King, Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power

“Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures.”
― Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper

“Filippo, on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centering altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centering. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo’s contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible.”
― Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

“Meissonier always spent many months researching his subject, finding out, for example, the precise sort of coats or breeches worn at the court of Louis XV, then hunting for them in rag fairs and market stalls or, failing that, having them specially sewn by tailors.”
― Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism