In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the anim… - Stephen Greenblatt

Ever since I was quite young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you — not just that you would find something, but that something would find you.

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera.

It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.