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“... What is Venus, or rather the nude woman, doing in Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery? Looking at her face in a mirror held for her by Cupid. Or so it seems to me; also to every visitor to the Gallery whose opinion I have sought, and to the mid-17th-century compiler of the inventory of paintings belonging to the picture’s first owner, Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán ...”

“... An ace caff with quite a good museum attached’. Some of the stuff there is quite sexy too, the advertisements for the V & A suggested. ‘We have to learn to be more popular without trivialising,’ says the Director. With whom? Certainly not foreign visitors, who found the advertisements very bizarre. Some may suppose that they were designed to captivate the man who enjoys the pin-up in his tabloid paper over a cuppa or a pint in a smoky café or pub, but he might have found the glib parody of Surrealism bewildering – the Indian fertility goddess blended with the model’s busty profile, the varnished nails on the ivory nude ...”

“... John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5 ...”

“... The world of art is an enchanting deception,’ Hazlitt confided as he conducted his readers into the new picture gallery at Dulwich and straight to the ‘Cuyp next the door’. ‘You may lay your finger on the canvas; but miles of dewy vapour and sunshine are between you and the objects you survey.’ To think of doing this is to realise that more than ‘deception’ is involved ...”

“... In​ 1811, at the age of 26, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau inherited the estate of Muskau (nearly 200 square miles in size, annexed to Saxony in 1806 but allotted to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna and partly absorbed by Poland in the 20th century), together with the smaller estate of Branitz. He was determined not only to carry out improvements but to create a landscape park on the English model ...”

“... Elizabeth Prettejohn’s​ book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple leaving England for Australia on a crowded boat. It is insistent in its sharp focus, and brilliant, even strident, in its modern palette: the purple and green of cabbages hanging from the ship’s railing, the bright rose of a windswept silk bonnet ribbon cutting across the centre of the picture, and the mauve fingers of an otherwise concealed infant ...”

“... When, in 1553, Andrea Mantegna married Nicolosia, daughter of Jacopo Bellini, one of the foremost artists in Venice, he was himself the leading painter in Padua. A marriage of this sort is unlikely to have been a love match, or at least merely a love match. One of Jacopo’s sons, Giovanni, may have been Mantegna’s pupil or protégé: he was five or so years younger than Mantegna, seems not to have achieved by this date any great reputation, and his early work was remarkably similar in manner to that of his brother-in-law, as is clear to visitors to the National Gallery in London, who have the chance to compare paintings by each, of more or less the same size, with the same subject (the Agony in the Garden) and in the same remarkable state of preservation ...”

“... Schnabel is the latest American wunderkind, half-Courbet, half-apeman,’ announced Waldemar Januszczak in the Guardian of 29 December 1982. At the Venice Biennale he impressed with his anger. At the Kassel Documenta he impressed with his absence, for somehow the organisers had deliberately chosen to overlook him. In a half-hearted show he emerged as a whole-hearted omission ...”

“... In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any ‘purchase’ on Chardin’s painting, A Lady Taking Tea, to which ‘our primary explanatory duty is due.’ It is bracing to discover that we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation ...”

“... There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome ... He thinks little of the works of other masters ... All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature. And so he will not make a single brushstroke without taking it straight from life ...”

“... In the early years of the 16th century a Vatican official called Angelo Colocci, who had graduated from curial abbreviator (responsible for internal memoranda) to apostolic secretary (poised below the coveted position of domestic secretary, or Papal p.a.), took to prowling around the small shops and market stalls of Rome in pursuit of the heavy, polished lumps of basalt that were used by tailors and weavers to press cloth ...”

“... Opposite the first page of Lorne Campbell’s Renaissance Portraits is a large colour plate of a pair of young female hands emerging from crisp and translucent white cuffs with black borders. The hands, which clasp soft buff kid gloves against a black satin gown, belong to Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan – or rather to the arresting full-length portrait of her by Holbein reproduced nearby ...”

“... The most significant event to have taken place in Italy in recent years, as far as the art and architecture of that country is concerned, is the institution of an annual opening of numerous normally inaccessible historic buildings in Naples, organised by the private charity Napoli Novantanove. The two open days in May last year attracted a million visitors ...”

“... In the Preface to his new book Richard Wollheim tells how he ‘evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding’. He looked at them for a very long time – longer than us – and then they told him what they were all about. I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was ...”

“... The paths which wander so bewilderingly through the densely-planted hills of the old section of the Père Lachaise cemetery eventually give way to the monotony of straight and level streets tightly packed with the ornate stone homes of the dead bourgeoisie of the Belle Epoque. It is there that you will eventually come, with a shock, across Victor Noir ...”