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“... Henry VI had an unusually long reign, but on most counts a singularly unfortunate one. He lost the lands gained in France by his father Henry V, he became embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, his son was killed and he himself died in mysterious circumstances as a prisoner in the Tower of London. Although lacking the qualities required in an effective monarch, he proved to be an outstanding patron of education, founding Eton College in 1440 and in the following year a college in Cambridge, now known as King’s College ...”

“... Apart​ from the chance invention of Prussian blue soon after 1700, the range of colours available to artists changed very little until the 19th century, when modern chemistry came into its own. Painters, of course, were not the only or, in most cases, the main consumers of these colours. They were used, for example, in the dyeing of cloth, the production of ceramics and for the decoration of all types of object, including buildings and sculpture as well as products for domestic use ...”

“... Successful artists are usually attracted to major cities, where reputations are most easily made and commissions most abundant. Barocci was a conspicuous exception. Born in the 1530s in the provincial backwater of Urbino, the birthplace also of Raphael, he completed his training in Rome, but then, probably in 1563, returned to his native town, where he remained for almost the whole of his life, dying there in 1612 ...”

“... The small exhibition at the National Gallery entitled Titian’s First Masterpiece: ‘The Flight into Egypt’, open until 19 August, is centred on a large canvas from the Hermitage. The picture has not been much discussed by scholars. This is partly because it has just emerged from a lengthy restoration, partly because it is known to most specialists mainly or only through photographs, and not least because it does not look much like any other painting generally accepted as by Titian ...”

“... For anyone​ wishing to organise an exhibition of his works, Veronese presents a particular challenge. He was exceedingly prolific and many of his best paintings are too large to be moved. He also employed a team of able assistants, whose contribution to individual pictures is generally hard if not impossible to assess. The Veronese show now at the National Gallery (until 15 June) is the largest devoted to him since one held in Venice in 1939, and it is striking that of the forty pictures not from the gallery’s own collection, half were also displayed in that earlier exhibition, not because in every case they are of exceptional quality, but because their owners are prepared to lend them ...”

“... The assessment​ of Giovanni Battista Moroni written in 1648 by Carlo Ridolfi, his first biographer, has never been seriously challenged. Ridolfi says that Moroni, a pupil of Alessandro Moretto of Brescia, had a natural gift for portraiture, and it was through his portraits rather than his religious paintings that his reputation had survived. He adds that portraits do not belong in the first rank of painting, since they do not give the artist full scope to demonstrate his talent, because he is obliged to paint what he sees; but when they are good likenesses and skilfully painted they can only be praised ...”

“... With the hyperbole typical of the guidebook writer, Francesco Sansovino asserted in 1561: ‘Take it from me, there are more pictures in Venice than in all the rest of Italy.’ This is obviously not true, but it is almost certainly the case that during the 16th century more oil paintings were produced in Venice than in any other city of Europe. Many were undistinguished, but virtually all of them, as contemporaries everywhere recognised, reflected a distinctive local tradition whose best representatives were among the outstanding artists of their day ...”

“... Within​ a generation of Raphael’s death in 1520 it was widely recognised that his career, along with those of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, marked a turning point in the development of painting in Italy and, by implication, in the rest of Europe. As Pierre-Jean Mariette remarked in 1729, in the so-called Recueil Crozat, a lavish collection of reproductions of famous European paintings, this was ‘the time in which, as everyone knows, the fine arts emerged from their tombs ...”

“... for a statement so weighted with critical responsibility is not the job of a simple letter. I hope to be able to do this in due course, in a proper essay, where my earlier opinions on the Master, often exploited (sometimes without quoting the source) by more recent scholars, will be given a more strictly personal justification. But all he did was to ...”

“... As visitors to the recent exhibition of Dutch art at the Royal Academy will know, emblems, once the province of antiquarians, are now of great interest to historians of art. For more than a decade scholars have argued that these combinations of a motto, a picture and an explanatory poem, pointing a simple moral lesson, provide a key to the understanding of Dutch painting of the 17th century ...”

“... Sir Ernst Gombrich is not only one of the very few historians of art now alive whose ideas have aroused wide interest outside his immediate discipline, but he is also an astonnishingly skilful lecturer. It is therefore only appropriate that he should so often have been invited to give those formal university lectures devoted to the discussion of general cultural issues ...”

“... For centuries​ the reputation of Venetian Renaissance painters largely depended on the comments made about them in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Vasari was in Venice for several months in 1542, but he was evidently unaware that Lorenzo Lotto, a generation older than him, was also living there and that they had acquaintances in common. During his visit he made notes about a couple of paintings by Lotto in the city, but recorded nothing about his life, so the account that he provided in the first edition of his book, published in 1550, was only a paragraph long ...”

“... the provenance by Margaret Dalivalle. She had originally proposed that the picture had belonged to Charles I and had been acquired for £30 – a rather low sum – by a certain John Stone after the execution of the king in 1649, when it was described as ‘a peece of Christ done by Leonardo’. This fitted with an earlier theory that a Salvator Mundi by ...”

“... The collaboration​ between Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo, the theme of the beautiful if rather didactic exhibition now at the National Gallery, is one of the strangest episodes in the history of Renaissance art. Sebastiano was born in Venice around 1485, ten years after Michelangelo. Aged about twenty, Sebastiano became attracted by the work of another young local artist, Giorgione ...”

“... In the last forty years Kenneth Clark did more than anyone else to create an interest in the art of Renaissance Italy, but Edgar Wind had a much greater influence on the way in which this art has been studied. Both men were outstanding lecturers and gifted writers, and both, in very different ways, were influenced by the work of Aby Warburg. Both, too, were particularly drawn to the early Renaissance in Florence and to the High Renaissance in Rome, to those masterpieces, in fact, which occupy the central place in the English and American canon of great art ...”