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“... with palm leaves, in imitation of Christ; Brigge, at the head of his liberated prisoners, leads a madonna (his wet-nurse) and child into neighbouring towns. He is at last set on and beaten to death for blasphemy, and seems for all the world to be another of Bennett’s failed revolutionaries. But he is more than that, or at least something different from ...”

“... are female arms flung straight above her head, enclosed by glossy foliage: a goddess of the cliff, madonna, sacred prostitute of the ravine. The Mekon blasts me from his dream: Disaster isn’t vegetable, you fool! I grip a ledge, securely lodge my boots. My hesitation turns her back into a tree. The noise of time is visible from here, bouncing off the chasm ...”

“... The format was also familiar from engravings and copies of Raphael’s paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, with its central ...”

“... constantly changing, even within the same medium. The symmetry manifested by Cimabue’s gigantic Madonna, or Duccio’s immense Christ-child, and the small saints who surround them, differs in kind from the symmetry expressed by Bellini’s geometrically proportioned figures. A la recherche de temps perdu closes by showing that all the divergent paths it has ...”

“... Lopez, Angelina Jolie) were familiarising the public with an Olympian, virago ideal. Madonna, no giantess, is more muscular than Marilyn Monroe or Joan Crawford was. But it would be a mistake to think that fashionable ideas of beauty and appropriate appearances are sealed from realities; rather, the new acknowledgment of female physical strength ...”

“... intellectually as well as emotionally. Bob was both sadist and masochist to me; for him I was madonna and whore. Life with him was never dull.’ The lead story in Slaves of New York reads like a come-on for a quite different book, featuring a cast of hip mutants strong on style, heavy sex and drugs, and ‘caring less’. Such a book would no doubt be ...”

“... culture, culture has now almost entirely absorbed politics. There is a good deal more interest in Madonna than in the multinationals. There was always, however, an alternative heritage. The young Marx owed much of his critique of capitalism to the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller, and aesthetic notions lurk within the political and economic thought of his ...”

“... Their moral qualities were underscored by the presence of paintings with subjects such as the Madonna in a garland of flowers or Christ’s healing of the blind man. Those studying the pictures can be identified as gentlemen or possibly noblemen by their accoutrements of swords and staffs: the galleries and their inhabitants appear to reinforce a concept ...”

“... is the promised land, Disneyworld for all. And there are gods, Carlo mio, in supermarket heaven. Madonna of the sequin tights. And Maradona, he of the hand of God. Has it ever struck you how those two names ... He breaks off for a moment: ‘he was repeating himself, he knew,’ but he can’t stop. Possibly this much of a muchness doesn’t matter; the ...”

“... he was not. And the epiphany in Cologne Cathedral in 1938, his reaction to a portrait of the Madonna behind the high altar, didn’t happen either. This transformative moment seems to have been borrowed from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. These are the recollections of an older man trying to give meaning to his life and work. They do however represent a kind ...”

“... It’s not immediately obvious that she smiles with love for her daughter (unlike, say, the toothy Madonna in Joos van Cleve’s Virgin and Child who glows with affection as she presses her breast to her son’s mouth). The artist gazes straight out of the picture but not in the conventional fashion: she is looking at something, and her daughter has turned to ...”

“... Ambrosio’s cell with fatal ease. Matilda’s ‘exquisite’ face mirrors the painting of the Madonna that Ambrosio formerly worshipped, so that his pious adoration of the Virgin is transformed into lust for a demon. No wonder Lewis’s contemporaries were taken aback. Anti-Catholic polemic was common in the late 18th century, but it had not previously ...”

“... curtains. The country was awash with milk. Kitchens and bedrooms were hung with pictures of the Madonna and Child. After the arrival of infant formula in the 1950s, breastfeeding became more of a chosen, middle-class activity, but it was still common in the countryside, and was everywhere practised as a fairly optimistic form of contraception. Still, though ...”

“... women, according to Dr McLynn’s casebook, was that old and familiar one of seeing them as either madonna or whore. His ‘profound ambivalence’ meant that while he might ostensibly be courting Virginia Ambella – or Katie Gough-Roberts, or Alice Pike or even, first time around, Dorothy Tennant (who later married him) – what he was unconsciously courting ...”

“... musings, even for comic purposes. An American art critic featured on a recent TV documentary about Madonna and her eclectic borrowings puts this sort of stuff in context: ‘We are invited to call it post-modernism,’ was his deadpan verdict, ‘but I prefer to call it shopping.’ Sheldrake is one of the bit-part players in Lodge’s satirical tableau of the ...”