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“... scales and perspectives were unprecedented in the history of altar painting. The front showed the Madonna and Child in a heavenly court of saints and angels; the reverse told the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ in 43 distinct panels. The Maestà was sawn apart at the end of the 18th century and the panels dispersed into different collections; this ...”

“... gazes into the landscape, her hand at her mouth, children folded around her like a Renaissance Madonna, is famous partly because it was immediately put into the public domain. The rest of her work is mostly hidden away in the Oakland Museum of California. (I could scream when I think of what happens to women artists’ archives: burned like ...”

“... list of guests. At the wedding, as the other nuns watched and listened, Benedetta claimed that the Madonna looked on benevolently while Jesus placed a gold ring upon her finger. Speaking once again through her, the Saviour then delivered an extraordinary sermon on the merits of his bride, whom he wished, he said, to be ‘empress of all the nuns’. All who ...”

“... the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna. In Freedom Uncut, Liam Gallagher describes him as a ‘modern-day Elvis’. Fans and the record business wanted more: more music, more appearances, more concerts, more everything. Almost disdainfully, he signed a multimillion-dollar, multi-album deal ...”

“... see The blue, if that is possible! Bright white Of the attendants; and the mystery And calm of the madonna; and my fright. I flee, but to a mirror. In it, they Are rooms behind me in our entrance hall About to leave – the image that will stay With me. My future was behind me. All The future is a mirror in which they Are still behind me in the entrance ...”

“... opportunity, to play at being ‘Lola Montez’, just as Marilyn played at being ‘the girl’ or Madonna has played at being ‘Madonna’. In Truth or Dare, the documentary that followed one of Madonna’s tours, her then lover Warren Beatty comments: ‘She doesn’t want to live ...”

“... located at the heart of the baby-boomers, roughly midway between President Clinton and Madonna – has taken this tendency to an extreme. We would be likely to believe that no one before us had argued for school desegregation, worried about the apolitical masses, lived in split-level houses, used automated tools, got sick because of ...”

“... geometry of the six stationary saints placed in architectural symmetry around the throne of the Madonna in Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece (in the Accademia in Venice) to the rotating circle of restless figures in Leonardo da Vinci’s approximately contemporary Adoration of the Magi. Bellini would never have composed a painting in such a dynamic ...”

“... Polly, Pollian, together with more dignified and maternal tags in middle age – Madre, Mutter or Madonna. Her surname was harder to lose. Her strong face and still more robust mind did not fit her for the conventions of Victorian courtship and marriage. George Henry Lewes, the man she finally settled down with, was one of the few members of her circle still ...”

“... Parker on a picture given by William Randolph Hearst to his mistress: Upon my honour, I saw a Madonna Hanging within a niche Above the door of the private whore Of the world’s worst son of a bitch. I’m not sure that this is so inappropriate (whores have often had devotional paintings). It would be more out of place in a museum. He also tells the ...”

“... satisfaction, disembodied from the soldier’s quest. Botticelli’s Venus is a Peruginesque Madonna with no clothes, posed on a pagan shell. The formidable eyeballs of Piero’s risen Christ, separated from the cornea in their upward gaze, forbid any offering from the spectator of devotion or reciprocity. The smile of Leonardo’s famous portrait is ...”

“... Queen Mary, looking like a sideboard in the throes of a spiritual crisis, and the blue and gold Madonna of the Atlantic, by Kenneth Shoesmith, which was wheeled into the first-class drawing room on Sundays for Catholic mass. The Queen Mary was perhaps the most stylish of the British liners. Cunard, wary on the one hand of cutting-edge functionalism while ...”

“... once more about fulfilment outside the home, as feminists used to argue – a politics not of Madonna and Child, but just of Madonna, a form of Vater-schuld, more against marriage than about children (‘I am not, have not been, and never will be, a married woman,’ she boasts, since she looks to ‘an ethically ...”

“... San Sebastiano, which contains the world’s greatest collection of paintings by Veronese, and the Madonna dell’Orto, which contains the most moving and sublime of Tintoretto’s canvases, have been reopened, as have many other churches in the quieter (often eerily silent) quarters of the city, well off the main tourist routes. Venice retains within its ...”

“... number, and had been working the phones to keep people away, everybody came. Or almost everybody. Madonna, who was next to me on the dinner placement, cancelled at the last moment, as is her right. Perhaps she didn’t feel she had been well seated. Never mind; I was able to introduce Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of ...”