“... to learn that by the 1890s Cassatt was being held up in France as ‘the painter of the Modern Madonna’. In George Lecomte’s words of 1892: ‘When Miss Cassatt represents mothers and children, her compositions have a nobility to them, conveying the highest characteristics of the HOLY FAMILY, but a Holy Family of modern times.’ Where did that idea ...”

“... of her ordinary life: a bed, a candle, a stool, a lectern. Porter’s is Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, in which a heavily pregnant Virgin points to her belly while a couple of angels theatrically raise the curtain of a canopy for her. Tomlinson’s opening poem is an account of the painting in which the angel foretells not a Christian parousia ...”

“... Cecilia, a successful obstetrician. But they have no children. Edwin, contemplating images of the Madonna and child, is broody. Like Colin restlessly envisioning his unknown father, Edwin wonders whether his meagre life might be transformed by a child. ‘If he and Cecilia had had children, if they had a daughter, would their lives be different? Would there ...”

“... his extravagantly reckless father. The Duke of Deception; and Doris Lessing’s story ‘The Black Madonna’, about an Italian prisoner of war in Southern Africa, making a film-set village for a military exercise: ‘They heard a voice booming through the loudspeakers: “The village that is about to be shelled is an English village, not as represented on the ...”

“... because Lord Southsea had left, Algenib threw herself at the feet of the Madonna, in a chapel full of nuns delicately made-up.’ The picturegoer remembers how she hated ‘the gray-faced nuns’ at her convent school. ‘The only difference between this movie and life was that here the public knew it was being deceived.’ She turns ...”

“... surely, not Stewart Headlam, inspired the hearty socialist vicar in Candida, with the cruel madonna of a wife ready to betray him with a poet.) If it was his university, it also became the heart of his religion: his symbol of sin and redemption, the great conspiracy of exploitation, misery and wrong which he and his comrades would build into a new ...”

“... that art here took a fatal turning. Maybe inevitable, but chilling. ‘The Louvre version of the Madonna of the Rocks is so superior to the London one,’ Wölfflin wrote in 1899, ‘that it seems inconceivable that its originality could ever have been doubted.’ (This was before the archives coughed up evidence, such as it is, for why we have a second ...”

“... works are highly finished and carefully modelled, notably a couple of paintings of the Madonna produced in Florence in the 1480s, which were exhibited in Perugia, he was normally much less concerned about such qualities, and in this respect notably different from the leading painters of his generation, such as Perugino and Botticelli. Like ...”

“... husband’s hand finding his wife’s, cunnilingus, the burnt frame edge of a Renaissance Madonna and Child, chalk hearts on government pavements, a small boy sitting on the top of the slide and thumping his booted feet against the metal, silence. It is so common for language to be outwitted in the novel, and yet for the undoing to occur in beautiful ...”

“... care of the sick she is ‘St Emerence of Csabadul’. Cradling a stray dog, she is an ‘absurd Madonna’. Venting her rage she is Jehovah. As the novel develops, this legendary Emerence slowly proves knowable. The mythic outline softens, and from being a rigid archetype – or a series of archetypes – she relaxes into personhood. She is novelised and ...”

“... And not just because he has become such a Post-Modern operation that, as we used to say of Madonna, even his publicity gets publicity. One of his favourite metaphors – for accumulating phone-calls, deals, anxieties – is of jets stacked in the sky above some fogbound airport (perhaps ‘Manderley International Junk Novel Airport’), a consummate ...”

“... out and she couldn’t get up without me. I helped her in the shower, singing bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying herself and putting on face cream and brushing her teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I ...”

“... in effect, as the identifying attribute of Raphael, just as the baby Jesus is the attribute of the Madonna. Another example is provided by works showing the angel Gabriel appearing to the young Virgin, which are invariably now called an Annunciation. Rather unexpectedly, in texts before about 1800, when most pictures of this kind were still in churches, these ...”

“... all’. Soon enough Lucia is seized and brought to the castle, where she makes a vow that if the Madonna saves her, she will live the rest of her life a virgin. What she can’t know is that the Nameless One is undergoing a crisis. The idea of death, which once ‘instilled in him a courageous rage, now grips him with panic’. He is overcome by ‘the ...”

“... the Hogarthian ‘transgression’, of a bawdy Link Boy or a Nelly Obrien which parodies a Raphael Madonna and Child. Solkin’s account of the ‘ethical transvaluation of history-painting’, in which ‘the most public form of art became an instrument for the cultivation of those refined and sympathetic virtues which Hume and other mid-century Whiggish ...”