What it comes down to is that quality is as much or more about creators than about the things they create. Hear Barbara Tuchman on this:
“As I understand it, [quality] means investment of the best skill and effort possible to produce the finest and most admirable result possible. Its presence or absence in some degree characterizes every man-made object, service, skilled or unskilled labor - laying bricks, painting a picture, ironing shirts, practicing medicine, shoemaking, scholarship, writing a book. You do it well or you do it half-well. Materials are sound and durable or they are sleazy; method is painstaking or whatever is easiest. Quality is achieving or reaching for the highest standard as against being satisfied with the sloppy or fraudulent. It is honesty of purpose as against catering to cheap or sensational sentiment. It does not allow compromise with the second-rate.”
Going on, she describes Michelangelo’s project of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Intolerant of the lesser standards of his five assistants, he dismissed them and for four years worked alone to shape the masterpiece. She concludes, “That is what makes for quality - and its costs - and what helped to make Michelangelo one of the greatest artists, if not, as some think, the greatest, of all time. Creating quality is self-nourishing.”
Examine the words she uses to explain quality. They are about a human, a creator, not about a painting: “investment of the best skill and effort possible” - “you do it well or you do it half-well” - “reaching for the highest standard” - “honesty of purpose.”
Holding the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in view is like watching a fresh comet render those that came before it less fit to dwell in the heavens. Michelangelo’s painting, the outer excellence he produced, delights our aesthetic sensibilities. But the fresh comet that gives the spirit life is not so much this immaculate object of our outward-looking eyes, but is what must have been Michelangelo’s inner excellence, his immaculately engaged self which we catch through our inward-looking spiritual eyes, his place in the enshrined constellation of great creators, turning on in us respect for what may be called “creator-hood.”
(Extract from “Where Quality Comes From,” page 44 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
For a brief biography of Barbara Tuchman, click here. For some images of or relating to Barbara Tuchman, click here.
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