Quotations and Literature Forum

Where is this from... a sculptor who finishes a fine rendering of a king or queen... "I just removed everything that did not look like your highness."

Hmm.......well I cannot find anything but it sounds like it could be perhaps Michelangelo

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Every man carries a circle of hell around his head like a halo. Every man, every man has to go through hell to reach his paradise.
Robert De Niro, Cape Fear

I heard this the other day - perhaps on Quote, Unquote. It was in reply to a nineteenth or twentieth century British monarch, I think.

Ah, but then there this:

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
~ Michelangelo
http://quotes.prolix.nu/Art/Michelangelo/

The sculpture was always in the block of ice, I just removed what was not the sculpture.
--Revised from MichelAngelo
http://www.culinarycentral.com/about_the_chef.htm

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."
~ Elie Wiesel

It shows up in a lot of religious sermons as an "old story"
Someone asked a sculpture how he could take a big piece of marble and make it look like a horse. He said that you take your hammer and chisel and you knock off everything that does not look like a horse and when you are through what you have left looks like a horse.

A man who was seen chiseling a rock into a beautiful horse was asked, "How do you make a sculpture of a horse?" The artist responded, "I simply chisel away everything that doesn't look like a horse."

By the way, the carving part is easy if you just remove any foam that doesn't look like a horse.
http://www.dillonworks.com/portfolio/ga ... pge_4.html

Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.