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“... all, that worshippers chiefly addressed their prayers: the Virgin of so many Annunciations, the Madonna, to whom Van Eyck gives gold tresses.The exhibition in Ghent gave you a window onto this world, indeed no glass was ever clearer, but you hardly saw the man who cleaned it. Man in a Red Turban, the panel that must be Van Eyck’s self-portrait, stayed in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christ in the Resurrection is likened to a ‘grim Umbrian peasant, up before daybreak’, and the Madonna del Parto is an ancient goddess, certainly, but also as ‘rustic as any mountain girl standing in the doorway of the woodshed’. Somewhat reluctantly, Longhi admitted that there was no likelihood that Piero had studied ancient Egyptian art, and no way ...”

“... But from that beginning he gets to the heart and soul of Hawks’s movie. He rants about Madonna; after a list of her various film involvements up to Dangerous Games, he writes: ‘The burden does not lighten … then all the ads said she was Evita – no matter that she managed hardly any emotional involvement, and again seemed incapable of ...”

“... off, shows how effective this process can be. Mother and Child (Divided) is a profane yet tender Madonna, a pietà that’s a comment on abattoirs, carnivorousness, mad cow disease and other things – but the spectacle has become familiar. I can almost look at it now without looking away, though when some visitors asked me if there was a lamb in the womb of ...”

“... because there was a shortage of trained nurses. I cried in pain as a catheter was disconnected: ‘Madonna!’ Why had I sworn in Italian? For two weeks I lay in the neurosurgery ward. My head hurt like hell and my right arm had large blue-black bruises on it where the Sisters of Mercy injected painkillers. In the public ward with me were survivors of ...”

“... green and white. Graduates processed wearing their brightly coloured hoods. Some women held madonna lilies, others garlands, many wore crowns of flowers, and carried pennants and banners with resonant slogans such as ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death!’ Mrs Pankhurst’s empty carriage – she had been taken back to prison that day – followed the ...”

“... 37); an abortion Leah had; the spooky monologue of a statue, Our Lady of Willesden, ‘the Black Madonna’; and a scene at a pharmacy, when Leah is given the wrong packet of photographs, one with pictures of Shar. Hard to tell the significance of that 37: a prime number; the normal human body temperature in Celsius; the number of plays attributed to ...”

“... Juan, living in 17th-century Spain, requests protection from the ludicrously ornate statue of the Madonna, the revered Virgin of the Seven Daggers, who presides over a ‘pompous, pedantic and contorted’ church in Granada. Despite her devotee’s history of spectacular sin, the Virgin acknowledges Don Juan’s prayer and promises salvation. Reassured, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of their own images, whether it’s Colette Modelling in the Beauty Parade, C Performing as Madonna or Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (which echoes the shot of the aristocrats in their carriage in Visconti’s The Leopard). These are faces that want to be seen. Caravaggio’s Bacchus is tacked to the wall behind a portrait of a woman staring ...”

“... subtext. The examples chosen to support some of the arguments are arresting: ‘I may mistake Madonna [a popular singer and lapsed Catholic, m’lud] for a minor deity, but can I be mistaken about the feelings of awe this inspires in me?’; ‘I still believe that profanity is a sin, even though my conversation is blue with it much of the time.’ And ...”

“... beams his messages to Africa and Pakistani mullahs sustain their anti-Western animus by watching Madonna on MTV, fundamentalism must sooner or later lose its teeth. The enemy of God is not Satan, but cultural and religious ...”

“... assumed the form of crows. It took a solemn procession, an exorcism and the intervention of the Madonna before the area was made safe and the church of Santa Maria del Popolo could be built in the same place. We get occasional snapshots of what Nero was up to in the Infernal Years from clerical handbooks. One account has him bathing in a seething pool of ...”