[The] battle for liberation from art

'[The] battle for liberation from art, which has to be fought out again and again by every artist, received cultural expression in the Renaissance, in which the individualist artist-type saved himself, by the concept of genius, from threatened suffocation by Gothic and Classical. He had, indeed, to accept and employ the ideal forms . . . if only that he might assert himself positively as artist; but the cultural significance of the much-admired Renaissance lies not in the Classical form'which was developed to a higher level in Greece'but in this individual winning through, which equally raises it above the anonymous Gothic.'

'Otto Rank, The Artist's Fight With Art, from Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson, 1932.