“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there is so much printout that we can’t see Liz and Steve: it could be Lord Lucan and Madonna having it off behind that mountain of electronic excreta. Nowhere in these illustrations do we see a book, or a human being reading a book. The Codex would seem to be BL 2000’s dirty little secret. Presumably there will be a grimy oubliette in Euston ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on Mount Scopus, Mohammad ... father of newborn twins, the mother of a dead son ... a Gothic Madonna ... erect in her straight chair welcoming us to her hilltop blue-green with olive trees in the village of Taybeh, young Doris Salah ministering to dispossessed women at the YWCA, the Beduin boy with the lamb, Sassa who talks too much, motherly ... strong ...”

“... to become lovers in the physical sense, he converted her into his ‘Dearest Mother’ and his ‘Madonna’. A new chapter in his life began when, in February 1875, he struck up an acquaintance, soon to become an ardent friendship, with the poet W.E. Henley, who was receiving treatment in the Old Surgical Hospital. In the summer of this year and the next he ...”

“... Van Vechten: ‘I shall write a poem about it – – you should hear what a tramp calls the Madonna when he’s having his abdomen cut open without anaesthetic.’ But she soon became bored, and in 1916, leaving her children in Italy with their nurse, Loy moved to New York, ostensibly to earn money and obtain an American divorce from Haweis (who had by ...”