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He was a difficult man , and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her ; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model . How far this influenced the imagery of his later paintings seems to me debatable ; but I believe that he did retain throughout his career that fundamental premise of Byzantinism , that beauty of materials gold , crystal , enamel and translucent stones gives art its splendour and its power to arouse our emotions . " " I enjoin you not to encumber yourself with words , unless you address yourself to the blind ; - if you want to address yourself through words to the ear , and not to the eye , discuss such things as substance and nature ; - do not trouble yourself with things of the eye , to try and make them pass through the ear ; - you would be far surpassed in this by painting . He also used part of the masthead to indicate the newspaper itself resting on the table . It has often been doubted , and this forces me to look at the picture again in a different spirit . He was as shamelessly delighted with himself as a prize stallion . It is doubly touching that a dour , sarcastic man like Beckmann should picture himself with this romantic attribute . " From youth to old age , Rembrandt scrutinized himself before the mirror , painting , etching , and drawing his changing physique and physiognomy as well as the varying psychological states that reflected the fluctuating fortunes of his fife . He was about to marry into one of the leading Tory families , the Clarkes ( owners of the notorious tea concession ) . The richness and iridescence of the materials , by challenging my senses , give me a flash of spiritual insight which a more reasonable consideration could not achieve . He had been in favor of the revolution , he had no reason to think highly of his royal masters and he wanted to keep his position as official painter , whoever was in power ; so at first he made friends with the ' invaders . He refused near the end of his life to permit a devoted critic to write his biography , indicating that " it would probably kill me to have such a thing appear ... ( It is unclear if they thought me crazy earlier . But , as we know from a much too long description by Brown himself , the whole was conceived in terms of literature , and can properly be classed as an illustration , on a heroic scale , to Carlyle 's Past and Present . In 1792 Goya had a serious illness which left him totally deaf : not just hard of hearing like Reynolds , or progressively bothered by interior buzzings like Beethoven , but stone deaf . His friends were struck by a likeness to the young Giorgione , and this was not lost on the painter himself , who entitled one of his finest self portraits ' a study in the Venetian manner ' . M. de Nieuwerkerke took both his hands and said he wanted to act frankly with him . That Grunewald was familiar with these discoveries he showed plainly enough whenever they helped him to express what he wanted to convey . And just as he used his brush to depict the dead and tormented body of Christ , he used it on another panel to convey its transfiguration at the Resurrection into an unearthly apparition of heavenly light . And when the humanist philosophers of the Medicean circle persuaded him that the inhabitants of Olympus , even that witch Madam Venus , could be made to symbolise Christian virtues , we can imagine how willingly Botticelli accepted their fine spun arguments .