Jean-Paul Sartre: "Ogni parola ha conseguenze. Il silenzio anche!"

• "Il desiderio si esprime attraverso la carezza, come il pensiero attraverso il linguaggio".

• "Desire is expressed by caress, thought by language".

• "All'inizio, l'uomo esiste, si alza e compare sulla scena, solo in seguito definisce se stesso".

• "Quando i ricchi si fanno la guerra, sono i poveri a morire".

• "When the rich make war, it's the poor that die".

Auguste Rodin | The Thinker (detail) | Musee Rodin

Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901

Artists from all countries came to Paris to find a connection to the modern era.

On his first trip to Paris, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) painted a street in Montmartre, the neighborhood that was popular among artists, in the Impressionist style.

The picture is part of a group of about thirty works that the then nineteen-year-old artist presented at his solo exhibition in the Galerie Ambroise Vollard in 1901 in Paris. | Source: © Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901 | Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Raoul Du Gardier | Genre / seascape painter

Raoul Alfred Henri Robert du Gardier (1 April 1871 - 17 October 1952) was a French painter.

He was born in Wiesbaden (Ger), the son of a very wealthy French family.

In 1890 he studied at the Écoles des Beaux Arts in Paris under Gustave Moreau, Théobald Chartran, Élie Delaunay and Albert Maignan.

Pietro Gabrini | Genre painter

Pietro Gabrini (Rome, 1856-1926) was an Italian painter and watercolourist who worked in variety of mediums on diverse subject matters.

A pupil of Guglielmo de Sanctis, he soon devoted himself to painting historical and literary subjects - "Romeo and Juliet", exhibited in Rome in 1885.

From the mid-1980s he also tackled genre subjects and landscapes, creating watercolors of the Roman countryside.

"Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei"! / "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are"!

• "Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei, è vero, ma ti conoscerei meglio se mi dicessi quello che rileggi".

• "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread".

François Mauriac

• "The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

• "La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro".

Herman Northrop Frye

Carl Spitzweg | The Bookworm, 1850 | Grohmann Museum

Mary Beale | Baroque painter

Mary Beale (née Cradock; bapt. 26 March 1633 – bur. 8 October 1699) was an English portrait painter.

She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London.

Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work - a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s.

Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject.

Cornelis de Heem | Baroque painter

Cornelis de Heem (8 April 1631 (baptized) - 17 May 1695 (buried) was a still-life painter associated with both Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age painting.

He was a member of a large family of still-life specialists, of which his father, Jan Davidszoon de Heem (1606–1684), was the most significant.

Cornelis was baptised in Leiden on 8 April 1631, and moved with his family to Antwerp in 1636.

Max Pietschmann | Symbolist painter

Ernst Max Pietschmann (1865-1952) was a German Symbolist painter.

Max Pietschmann studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1883 to 1889.

His teachers included Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels.

Pietschmann belonged to the painters' colony in Goppeln near Bannewitz, which specialized in plein air painting.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel: "The masses will always be below the average".. 1871

Journal Intime / 12th June 1871: - "Numbers make law, but goodness has nothing to do with figures.

Every fiction is self-expiating, and democracy rests upon this legal fiction, that the majority has not only force but reason on its side - that it possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom necessary for action.

The fiction is dangerous because of its flattery; the demagogues have always flattered the private feelings of the masses.

René Magritte (1898-1967) | Le lieu commun, 1964 | Christie's

Maurice Ravel: "The only love affair I have ever had was with music!"

• "Dobbiamo sempre ricordare che la sensibilità e l'emozione costituiscono il vero contenuto di un'opera d'arte".

• "Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second".

• "We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art".

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | Spanish Dancer | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

René Magritte | The “Renoir” period, 1940-1947

- "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight', I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: one, a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists, or rather, Impressionism in general, have managed to render in painting.

Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, two, a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" - René Magritte.

Jacques-Émile Blanche | Portrait painter

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was a French painter and writer.

His father, a fashionable nerve specialist, owned a clinic where many of Blanche's sitters had been patients.

As a painter he had both talent and charm, and he enjoyed a great vogue in his day.

His work lacks originality and was much influenced by such contemporaries as James Tissot and John Singer Sargent.

The loose brushwork and subdued colouring of his portraits are also reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough.

Jean-Etienne Liotard | Orientalist Pastel painter

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, Seated on a Sofa, 1752 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Etienne Liotard was a widely traveled artist whose French Huguenot family had settled in Geneva, where he was born, owing to the passage of the Edict of Nantes.

From 1738 to 1742 he lived in Istanbul (Constantinople) and thereafter painted genre scenes of non-Muslim women in Turkish costume, such as this one, which were greatly admired throughout western Europe.

In pastel, his technique is colorful and exceptionally smooth and flawless.

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, seated on a Sofa, 1752 (pastel over red chalk underdrawing on parchment) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rachel Ruysch | Baroque painter

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), who has been called the "most celebrated Dutch woman artist of the 17th and 18th centuries", was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch moved to Amsterdam with her family when she was three.

Her maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist from whom she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy.

Matthias Stom | Baroque painter

Matthias Stom or Matthias Stomer (1600-1652) was a Dutch, or possibly Flemish, painter who is only known for the works he produced during his residence in Italy.

He was influenced by the work of non-Italian followers of Caravaggio in Italy, in particular his Dutch followers often referred to as the Utrecht Caravaggists, as well as by Jusepe de Ribera and Peter Paul Rubens.

The Ladies of the Baroque | Part 1

As in the Renaissance Period, many women among the Baroque artists came from artist families. Artemisia Gentileschi is an example of this.

She was trained by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and she worked alongside him on many of his commissions.

Luisa Roldán was trained in her father's (Pedro Roldán) sculpture workshop.

Artemisia Gentileschi | Judith and her maid with the head of Holofernes, 1613 | Gallerie degli Uffizi, Firenze.

Michaelina Wautier | Baroque painter

Michaelina Wautier, also Woutiers (1604-1689), was a painter from the Southern Netherlands.

Only since the turn of the 21st century has her work been recognized as that of an outstanding female Baroque artist, her works having been previously attributed to male artists, especially her brother Charles.

Wautier was noted for the variety of subjects and genres that she worked in.

This was unusual for female artists of the time who were more often restricted to smaller paintings, generally portraits or still-lifes.

Maria Sibylla Merian | Baroque Era Illustrator

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator.

She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family.

Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel.

Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675.

Elga Sesemann | Expressionist painter

Elga Sesemann (March 28, 1922 - January 21, 2007) was a Finnish post-war neo-romantic painter.

She was an expressionist whose themes often included melancholy, depression, anxiety and loneliness.

Sesemann was born in Viipuri (Vyborg) on the Karelian Isthmus.

Sesemann's family is of German origin and grew up speaking German and Russian.

Pablo Neruda | Ode al primo giorno dell’anno / Ode to the First Day of the Year

Lo distinguiamo dagli altri

come se fosse un cavallino

diverso da tutti i cavalli.

Gli adorniamo la fronte

con un nastro,

gli posiamo sul collo sonagli colorati,

Olga Darchuk, 1976