Self-Conscious Striving
Even when the old masters painted humbler or comical subjects, even when they painted terribly, they were animated in theory, as no craftsman was, by the self-conscious striving for high art, the ambition to rival and surpass what they understood to be the paintings of the ancients.James Gardener in his article New Light on the Old Masters, The Magazine Antiques, March 2010, page 76.