“... of Disraeli’s Coningsby, would have been quite appropriate here: ‘Giorgione the gorgeous, Titian the golden, Rubens the ruddy and pulpy (the Pan of painting), some of Murillo’s beautiful shepherdesses, who smile on you out of darkness like a star, a few score first-class Leonardos.’ By 1847, when Thackeray’s parody appeared in Punch, Dickens had ...”

“... and in the company of her fellow modernists she turned into an ‘astonishing’ figure ‘with Titian hair … and a mellifluous flow of polysyllables which held every man in awe’ (as Kreymborg described her). After the five lean years during which no editor bothered to acknowledge her poems almost everyone (of her kind) wanted to publish them. Though ...”

“... original Gorgon poem’s title – ‘Andromeda and Perseus’ – which inverts the title of a Titian painting and thus makes female suffering central. In general he deprecates the device of incorporating one artform into another: ‘Ekphrasis is so dead, man. Bleak and needy shit.’ Even so, the book conducts a certain amount of ekphrastic ...”

“... of artists from Chardin to Rembrandt (by far the most frequently), Rubens, Signorelli, Stubbs, Titian, Turner, Van Eyck, Velázquez, Veronese, Vouet and Watteau. Often they were discussed in direct comparison with a contemporary artist whose work interested him. Thus Picasso was compared to Goya, in respect to their drawings, or Kokoschka to Rubens, in ...”

“... was down partly to the Italian light and air, and partly to the landscapes of Giorgione and Titian: ‘I can never paint in my old style again,’ he dutifully reported back to Linnell. ‘Both Italy and marriage were fatal,’ Grigson says, bleakly; and Campbell-Johnston doesn’t dissent from that view. There is much to admire in the Italian ...”

“... and coloured-in figures are in classic poses which you (rightly) feel you could trace back to Titian or Ingres. There are a couple of piping shepherds and in the distance a ring of dancers who will appear in one form or another in later works. The ground is yellow, the grass mauve as well as green. Many of the figures are set off by strong background ...”

“... Venetian commentators. What room for manoeuvre was there now left, in the wake of Bellini, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto? No doubt similar grumbles could have been heard in Rome too. A foundational tenet for all adherents to rationalism, from the Carracci to Maratta, was that God – i.e. Raphael – had departed this world in 1520. Painters who ...”

“... to buy and now here it is outside the back door.15 May. After supper we go down to look at the Titian exhibition, now in its last few days at the National Gallery. It’s 10.15 and the doors have only just closed so that the rooms still smell of the hordes that have been passing through; there are screwed up tickets on the floor and abandoned programmes ...”

“... hoodwinked West and seven other academicians to purchase (at ten guineas each) the ‘secret’ of Titian and his classic Venetian colouring. Gillray lined up the gullibles, seated and well-behaved like spaniels awaiting their biscuits, each with his easel ready and palette filled, and each emitting a thought balloon with a distinctive motto: ‘Will this ...”

“... Being a particularly human painter with quite a limited output Carpaccio is an artist, unlike Titian, say, or Veronese, who has fans. His grave, long-nosed elegantly turned-out young persons people a Venice that is still walkable-through today, though the picture here I would most have liked to see again isn’t of Venice at all but of the monks thrown ...”

“... art whose subjection to ageing, to ordinary wear and tear, is treated so relentlessly? Maybe in Titian. Maybe a tortured Christ. But Velázquez’s Mars is anti-Christ.And is there another male body in painting whose emasculation is so flagrant? The splayed legs and open lap – don’t they become in due course the stock shot of pornography? In the ...”

“... only other independent initiative is to learn about painting: ‘The lecture in the evening was on Titian. I am rather disappointed in him. He seems coarse & emotional.’ In the dearth of felt reactions to anything that is happening to him, you long for more such judgments, however priggish. At a concert in 1898 he likes ‘above all Tchsaikowski’s ...”

“... After a while the piece starts to look a bit dull and flat and you find yourself turning to Titian or Corot or Andy Warhol or (gulp) Tracey Emin with a certain relief. At this forlorn stage, you may even develop a distinct aversion to the once loved outsider piece: you’ve spent all that money framing it, you’ve made a place for it on the wall and in ...”

“... into them, male or female, and deploying their weight and balance as if from the inside. Even Titian cannot manage the business in quite the same way. The centre, or anchor, of Veronese’s vision was this: an internal, material, comprehensive inhabiting of bodies, and therefore an ability to depict their glittering outsides as manifestations of their ...”

“... are from 1993-94 – a late period as extraordinary, in its own quiet stone-butch way, as that of Titian, Milton or Yeats. You’d call it a flowering except there aren’t any flowers; just the same old pencil lines and stripes. But the lines and stripes have become positively floral in their glow and poise and breeziness. Most of the pictures are pink and ...”