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“... The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity ...”

“... The career of Leonardo da Vinci must be the most intimidating subject in the history of art. The paintings and preparatory drawings are a major topic in themselves, and any monograph on Leonardo the artist invites comparison with Kenneth Clark’s classic study, one of the best books of its type. Then there are the notebooks, a written legacy unparalleled in scale and range among surviving records of the Renaissance ...”

“... A friend of mine recently went to see Pisanello’s fresco of St George and the Princess in the Church of Sant’ Anastasia in Verona. She was soon accosted by the sacristan, who was eager to tell her the story. When he realised that she already knew it, he asked, ‘Do you want the allegory?’ and proceeded to explain that St George symbolised the Pope, the Princess was the Church, the dragon Heresy, and so on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A few days​ before his death in Rome in 1564 Michelangelo is said to have destroyed all the drawings in his house. He had done something similar on at least three previous occasions. But despite his efforts more than two hundred drawings are almost universally accepted today as being wholly or in part by his hand, and most experts would argue for a much higher figure ...”

“... There used to be a widespread practice in Italy, particularly in the 1960s and in Tuscany, of removing baroque additions of all kinds from old churches, in a usually implausible attempt to restore them to something resembling their medieval appearance. This led to the destruction or dispersal of many fine works of art, and often gave the restored buildings an empty appearance they had probably never previously had, or been meant to have ...”

“... On 6 November​ , after ten days of legal argument in the High Court, judgment was handed down in the dispute over the University of London’s obligations towards the Warburg Institute. The institute developed out of the private library of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), a wealthy art historian in Hamburg, who was supported by his four brothers, all of them bankers ...”

“... Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or lubricity. That he greatly enjoyed researching, writing and defending ...”

“... of 1877, biographies of Titian have almost invariably been biographies of his pictorial style. Charles Hope’s book, although in scope and ambition much more restricted than Crowe’s and Cavalcaselle’s, marks in this respect a most welcome change. It is the first truly informative account of Titian’s life published in English in recent ...”

“... of Venus and The Andrians for Alfonso d’Este, he found a way of telling stories which, as Charles Hope puts it in the introductory essay to the catalogue, ‘has proved so seductive that we still see mythology through the eyes of Titian and his later imitators’. Contemplative, even slightly melancholy pastoral has been replaced by a dance-like ...”

“... between Paul III and Ottavio, and that for that reason the picture may have displeased the pope. Charles Hope, in his Titian of 1980, rightly dismissed this sort of interpretation as anachronistic, adding that Titian was the ‘last person to indulge in such criticism of his sitters, least of all when he was trying to obtain favour from them’. Hale ...”

“... was present in a discussion of Piero by a colleague of Baxandall at the Warburg Institute, Charles Hope, published in the London Review of Books in March 1983 (Vol. 5, No 5). Both Baxandall and Hope point out that a function of this kind is hard to reconcile with the esoteric symbolism and concealed topical ...”

“... though she inhabits a 16th-century bedroom and confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as ...”

“... head a Beethoven sonata and cadenza.In autumn 1850 Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie was ill. Charles and Emma took her to Ramsgate.Every day behind a stripy awning,    Blue Woman lowers Annie into sea.But Annie catches cold. Then influenza.    He takes her, with sister Etty for company,to Malvern. Emma, seven months pregnant, stays ...”

“... as far as Thackeray: gentility’s struggle to preserve itself against invading shabbiness. The St Charles family is first discovered living a pre-war, prosperous ‘leisured life’. 1914 brings catastrophe and gradual decline. The heroine’s dashing father loses a leg in the Great War and survives a whisky-sodden philanderer. The family’s only son is ...”