Quotes from Martin Gayford

But then, perhaps when we contemplate one of these sculptures we are not really looking at the Pharaoh Sesostris or Senusret but, as LF put it, at humanity. Nearly

Night' was a code word for sodomy in Tuscan comic literature – as is suggested by the title of the magistrates specifically detailed to deal with the problem, the Officers of the Night. According to court records, most encounters between casual male partners took place between sunset, when work ended, and the third or fourth hour after nightfall, the time of curfew, when the taverns closed.

St Peter's – as Michelangelo re-imagined it – was the prototypical baroque church. Elderly, grief-stricken, constipated, Michelangelo made himself a great master of architecture: an art that, of course, was not even his profession.

Then they say that they are taken out of this world, but I don't want to be out of this world, I want to be absolutely in it, all of the time.'LF

But he was an extremely unaesthetic person. When you said that such and such was a beautiful work of art he seemed quite put out. He would say, "What do you mean? Prove it!"' 'Orwell

looks promising and I've taken it up again on occasion. But whenever I did, I realized why I'd not carried on in the first place – in the same way that a specialist might say of a child, that one's not going to grow up right. I could tell that it wouldn't develop into a finished picture.

There lies a paradox for a dedicated lover of art such as David or me: we devote a great deal of time and energy in the pursuit of art, diligently visiting museums, galleries, churches, mosques, temples and ruins where it is to be found. But of course much of what we look at was made for completely different reasons by pious Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Moslems.

There is a paradox here: the purpose of a great number of the things we call 'works of art' was and is religious. But when we encounter them in the circumstances for which they were made our reaction – or at least mine – is to feel awkward, a bit embarrassed at being there under false pretences. This is, perhaps, the mirror image of the bewilderment felt by a true believer at finding a sacred image in a museum, lined up with pictures of landscapes and kitchen tables.

The popular reaction to David seems to have been wonder at his size rather than at the artistry of his carving. He was a spectacle, a freakish oddity.

Photographers, like painters, seldom retire.

To visit Florence without visiting churches and museums would be perverse.

Indeed, in his view, being difficult – 'singular and reserved, or whatever you may be pleased to call it' – was actually a necessity for those who wanted to achieve remarkable things.

His sonnet no. 152 uses the metaphor of sculpture for salvation: 'By what we take away, lady, we give to a rugged mountain stone/A figure that can live? And which grows greater when the stone grows less.' Here was the fascination with sculpture as an act of discovery within a piece of marble: by chipping away, the figure was slowly revealed.

the picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life'.

I hate being lost, so much so that quite often I dream of not being able to find my way. Along with two other nightmares, missing trains and planes, it happens in reality quite frequently: cruelly often when I am searching for a church or museum containing a rare work of art.

A great deal of the information embedded in a work of art is not – yet at least – accessible just by looking at an image of it while sitting at home. The deepest and richest experiences are not virtual but physical: they involve looking at real things and talking to real people.

The pursuit of art is a journey that never stops; the more you see, the more you want to see.

A plentiful supply of paper – just as much as the study of ancient sculpture or single-point perspective – was among the factors that led to what we call the Renaissance. It allowed artists to think and work in different ways, a transformation as significant as the Internet and computer technology have been in the early twenty-first century.

There is no greater work of minimalist art than the dry garden in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ry?an-ji, Kyoto. This comprises fifteen rocks of various sizes set in a sea of white, raked gravel; almost nothing, but you could look at it for hours. It was made about 500 years before the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe remarked that less is more.

If you are painter it's your whole existence. It's not an activity

you can do a couple of days a week, then do something else. It's a bit like being an athlete. You have to keep fit and nimble.

from a small one. That's because, if you are looking at the original, its impact is physiological. In the same way, standing next to a big tree feels quite unlike being next to a sapling.

But Michelangelo did not want us to know how he learned to sculpt and, whatever the truth of the matter, he succeeded in suppressing it. The impression he wanted to pass down was that he just picked up the art of sculpture through sheer brilliance and inherent understanding of design; conceivably, that might even be correct.