Carving Is Easy, You Just Go Down

I Saw The Angel In The Marble And Carved Until I Set Him Free.

If In My Youth I Had Realized That The Sustaining Splendour Of Beauty Of With Which I Was In Love Would One Day Flood Back Into My Heart, There To Ignite A Flame That Would Torture Me Without End, How Gladly Would I Have Put Out The Light In My Eyes.

Already At Sixteen, My Mind Was A Battlefield: My Love Of Pagan Beauty, The Male Nude, At War With My Religious Faith. A Polarity Of Themes And Forms: One Spiritual, The Other Earthly.

I Live In Sin, To Kill Myself I Live; No Longer My Life My Own, But Sin's; My Good Is Given To Me By Heaven, My Evil By Myself, By My Free Will, Of Which I Am Deprived.

It Is Not Sufficient Merely To Be A Great Master In Painting And Very Wise, But I Think That It Is Necessary For The Painter To Be Very Moral In His Mode Of Life, Or Even, If Such Were Possible, A Saint, So That The Holy Spirit May Inspire His Intellect.