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“... Franz, a minor character who is a Jew, hides all night in a cupboard ‘with a big plaster Madonna looking at him’. He starts to pray to the Madonna to save him: Then all at once he had wanted to laugh at the thought that he, Franz, was all dressed up as a monk and was praying to the ...”

“... displaying, with a gesture of triumphant accomplishment, a painting he has just executed of the Madonna and Child. An angel is shown marvelling at the image, sufficiently persuaded by its likeness that he (or she) spontaneously reaches out to touch the Madonna’s garment. Guercino was enough of an art historian to know ...”

“... to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The Chosen One, in which the newborn and naked baby lies on the ...”

“... of scalinate, staircases that rise high into the hills, flanked by statues of the Padre and the Madonna. Nearby, a Portakabin serves as the studio of the official radio station, La Voce di Padre Pio. There is normally a three-hour wait to get into the Chiesa, though we get in quite quickly thanks to the rain. The hushed queue snakes round the ...”

“... programme of an author. ‘When I stand in the small graveyard at Monterchi before Piero’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, I know that I am present at a sacred (not simply a Christian) event. It is quite misleading to say that I am having an aesthetic experience. It would be more accurate to say that is is having me; I seem to do little more than provide an ...”

“... Child of 1886 but would focus on Munch’s run of iconic inventions from around 1893 – Puberty, Madonna, The Kiss and of course The Scream. Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye (until 14 October) goes out of its way not to be that show. Its curators, Clément Chéroux and Angela Lampe from the Centre Pompidou, have put on a capacious display, informed by a mission ...”

“... Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude due for her elucidation of why human beings are not in any way responsible for climate change, which her selected ‘real’ evidence shows isn’t happening anyway. We don’t have to be thankful ...”

“... distinction Hollander draws between real dress, legendary costume and mythic drapery. Piero’s Madonna del Parto is in modern dress; later, in Leonardo’s Annunciation she is in a ‘new version of the fourth-to-14th-century kirtle and mantle’. Giotto’s shepherds suggest contemporary clothes, his nobler figures are caped much as classical statues ...”

“... Coming upon the Madonna di Loreto away from its proper home, the Church of Sant’ Agostino, is like finding an old neighbour wandering the streets in bedroom slippers. I saw her in Rome a few months ago. Meeting her in the Royal Academy, where she is one of the greatest of the 15 works by Caravaggio in The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623 (the exhibition runs until 20 April), I felt I should take her by the elbow and see her safely back to the church she was made for ...”

“... at Ballinspittle in Ireland, where in 1985 a statue began wobbling before crowds of pilgrims, the Madonna’s message has been that however buffeted the faithful are by change, by reform, by the pressures and problems of modernity, she is on their side to help. The anthropologist William Christian Jr has explored the interpenetration of belief and ...”

“... of Helfgott which the film itself established – such is the logic of the culture industry. Madonna as Evita as Madonna as Evita. Or possibly Wilde as Bunthorne as Wilde as Bunthorne. For the co-extensive circulation of the two Helfgotts very nearly replicates Richard D’Oyly Carte’s American use of Wilde in a ...”

“... readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a time when he might ...”

“... once and for all, to the notion that Cassatt is nothing but a purveyor of sentimental, secularised Madonna and Child images for the mass market. Although, later in life, she specialised in mothers and children, as Griselda Pollock points out, the images are usually freshly observed and modern in their psychological understanding of the relationship, as well as ...”

“... did to other luxury accessories, such as the Islamic carpet and pagan Greek reliefs with which the Madonna is in this case also – and no less conspicuously – supplied. A lamp or an egg given special prominence – for instance, serving as a device on the reverse of a medal or on the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of ...”

“... sad blue and pink people, but more substantial. Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be ...”