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“... We would know very much less about Italian Renaissance Art, and indeed very much less would have been made of the very concept of the Italian Renaissance, had Vasari not published his Lives of the Artists in 1550 (and again, revised and enlarged, in 1567), providing us with biographies of more than two hundred Italian artists. A good place to reflect on the nature of Vasari’s achievement is the Uffizi in Florence ...”

“... When, in the early hours, Michelangelo completed carving his name on the band which passes between the breasts of the Virgin in his first Pieta (the one now behind bullet-proof perspex in St Peter’s), he was surprised by a nun who took him for an intruder. Reassured, she begged for some marble chips, which the sculptor, touched, gave her. In return, she made him a frittata, which he ate on the spot ...”

“... Bernard – originally Bernhard – Berenson was a Lithuanian Jewish refugee rescued from poverty by the charity of Bostonian plutocrats who sent him to Harvard and then to Europe. During the 1890s he established himself as an expert on Italian Renaissance art and simultaneously made his knowledge indispensable to the booming international art trade, which made him a very rich man by the time the second volume of his biography by Ernest Samuels opens in 1903 ...”

“... Each day, hundreds of people visit the world’s finest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but thousands come to see the superb, though less comprehensive and extraordinary, collection of Italian Renaissance painting in the National Gallery nearly two miles away. When they were made, the paintings were no more highly esteemed than the sculptures – nor were the two separated from each other ...”

“... the west, opening to the public on 5 April 1838. In the same month the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’s third novel, was published. Together with most of London’s fashionable society, Dickens visited the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions in order to see ‘those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet ...”

“... Impressionism became very quickly the house style of the haute bourgeoisie,’ T.J. Clark observes at the close of The Painting of Modern Life. Few seem to have resisted the invitations of Madame Verdurin or to have hesitated to adopt the pseudo-Rococo frame with whitened gilding. Renoir, in particular, who had begun his career decorating porcelain, ended it providing upper-class wall-ornaments ...”

“... It has been respectable for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint ...”

“... Even before Caravaggio’s premature death in violent and mysterious circumstances in 1610, pictures influenced by his work were to be found in many different parts of Europe. There were paintings of card parties inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff wall. Even more of them imitated the grimmer scenes he adopted in the second half of his career, in which a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit against deep shadow ...”

“... The rococo style transformed the character of the domestic interior. First in France, where the style originated in the late 17th century, and then in the rest of Europe, rooms were created which were lighter and more elegant and charming than those of any previous period. They were also audacious, often astonishingly so, in their treatment of space and their denial of solidity or stability ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... Jacopo della Quercia was one of the great sculptors of the early 15th century, comparable in stature with his contemporaries Donatello and Ghiberti, but his work is less consistent, and more difficult to discuss in the stylistic terms usually associated with Renaissance art. There are three famous works by Jacopo: the tomb of Ilaria del Caretto in Lucca, the doorway of San Petronio in Bologna and the reliefs and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena ...”

“... country house, Downton Castle in Herefordshire, which is Classical within and castellated without. Nicholas Penny suggests that Downton is not so much Gothic as Romano-British, and certainly the quest for the truly primitive was to be a driving force behind Knight’s forays into other artistic fields. About the same time, the mid-l780s, he began to ...”

“... material for material’s sake, towards the pebble which lives by its pebble-ish nature alone. Nicholas Penny’s book shows how these forces are reconciled. Materials bring meanings with them. Not even the most resonantly-named dyes and pigments (‘vermilion’, ‘ultramarine’, ‘indigo’) carry as much baggage as ...”

“... of Herbert Read (who escaped few of the Romantic traps), is missing altogether from Jones and Penny, the new and dependable source for knowledge of the artist.Deciding where the emphasis in Raphael’s achievement is to lie, historians must make choices which imply a view of history and a theory of genius. If they make no decision and offer an even-handed ...”

“... to a new series of monographs on art history of which the editors are Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny. It is the author’s first book, a revised version of a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Brown. Its timing – and its price – encour-comparisons with Velazquez, comparisons which would be rather unfair – though it is not unfair to ...”