“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”

—  Leonardo Da Vinci

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art." by Leonardo Da Vinci?
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Leonardo Da Vinci 363
Italian Renaissance polymath 1452–1519

Related quotes

Lawrence Durrell photo

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you…”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer
Kakuzo Okakura photo

“Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906), Ch. II.

Miyamoto Musashi photo

“"To release four hands" is used when you and the enemy are contending with the same spirit, and the issue cannot be decided. Abandon this spirit and win through an alternative resource.
In large-scale strategy, when there is a "four hands" spirit, do not give up - it is man's existence. Immediately throw away this spirit and win with a technique the enemy does not expect.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Dwight L. Moody photo

“I never yet have known the Spirit of God to work where the Lord's people were divided.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 148.

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

“But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

“In particular, this question, to the sculptor:
If a drawing is traced, even with the greatest precision, from another drawing, you will perceive that the one is a copy. Although the differences may deviate less than half a hair, recognizable only by perceptual sensitivity, unanimously we rule the work of the intruder's hand as non-art.
But where is the line of true art—when the sculptor's process often introduces the hands of a plaster caster, the mold maker, the grinder and the polisher, and the patina applier, all these processes and foreign hands intruding deviations upon what was once the original work?”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

1950s
Source: 'Questions to Students', one from a long list of questions, in an undated typescript among the David Smith Papers; probably written c. 1953-54; as quoted at website David Smith State http://www.davidsmithestate.org/statements.html

Andy Warhol photo

“In my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that's not the age we're living in.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

undated quotes
Source: Machine in the Studio, Caroline A. Jones, University of Chicago Press, 1996 pp. 197-198

“Artists are mechanics who work with their hands, making things. Artists are involved with the means of creativity, the nature of skills, the revelation of making. Art comes from the work, I see a painting as an expressive entity. There's no picture that I know of where the subject carries as much expressive possibility as the actual execution of the picture.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 9
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 2
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

Related topics