Painters and poets have liberty to lie. [ Burns ]

Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything. [ Horace ]

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael. [ Goethe ]

Once for all, beauty remains undemonstrable; it appears to us as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters, and, in short, of all feeling artists. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we do not wish them to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other destroy the likeness of the picture. [ Plutarch ]

You will get more profit from trying to find where beauty is, than in anxiously inquiring what it is. Once for all, it remains undemonstrable; it appears to us, as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters; and in short, of all feeling artists; it is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality. [ Ruskin ]