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“... opportunity, to play at being ‘Lola Montez’, just as Marilyn played at being ‘the girl’ or Madonna has played at being ‘Madonna’. In Truth or Dare, the documentary that followed one of Madonna’s tours, her then lover Warren Beatty comments: ‘She doesn’t want to live ...”

“... located at the heart of the baby-boomers, roughly midway between President Clinton and Madonna – has taken this tendency to an extreme. We would be likely to believe that no one before us had argued for school desegregation, worried about the apolitical masses, lived in split-level houses, used automated tools, got sick because of ...”

“... geometry of the six stationary saints placed in architectural symmetry around the throne of the Madonna in Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece (in the Accademia in Venice) to the rotating circle of restless figures in Leonardo da Vinci’s approximately contemporary Adoration of the Magi. Bellini would never have composed a painting in such a dynamic ...”

“... Polly, Pollian, together with more dignified and maternal tags in middle age – Madre, Mutter or Madonna. Her surname was harder to lose. Her strong face and still more robust mind did not fit her for the conventions of Victorian courtship and marriage. George Henry Lewes, the man she finally settled down with, was one of the few members of her circle still ...”

“... Parker on a picture given by William Randolph Hearst to his mistress: Upon my honour, I saw a Madonna Hanging within a niche Above the door of the private whore Of the world’s worst son of a bitch. I’m not sure that this is so inappropriate (whores have often had devotional paintings). It would be more out of place in a museum. He also tells the ...”

“... satisfaction, disembodied from the soldier’s quest. Botticelli’s Venus is a Peruginesque Madonna with no clothes, posed on a pagan shell. The formidable eyeballs of Piero’s risen Christ, separated from the cornea in their upward gaze, forbid any offering from the spectator of devotion or reciprocity. The smile of Leonardo’s famous portrait is ...”

“... Queen Mary, looking like a sideboard in the throes of a spiritual crisis, and the blue and gold Madonna of the Atlantic, by Kenneth Shoesmith, which was wheeled into the first-class drawing room on Sundays for Catholic mass. The Queen Mary was perhaps the most stylish of the British liners. Cunard, wary on the one hand of cutting-edge functionalism while ...”

“... once more about fulfilment outside the home, as feminists used to argue – a politics not of Madonna and Child, but just of Madonna, a form of Vater-schuld, more against marriage than about children (‘I am not, have not been, and never will be, a married woman,’ she boasts, since she looks to ‘an ethically ...”

“... San Sebastiano, which contains the world’s greatest collection of paintings by Veronese, and the Madonna dell’Orto, which contains the most moving and sublime of Tintoretto’s canvases, have been reopened, as have many other churches in the quieter (often eerily silent) quarters of the city, well off the main tourist routes. Venice retains within its ...”

“... number, and had been working the phones to keep people away, everybody came. Or almost everybody. Madonna, who was next to me on the dinner placement, cancelled at the last moment, as is her right. Perhaps she didn’t feel she had been well seated. Never mind; I was able to introduce Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of ...”

“... area but is probably just checking its sex; the infant is at this moment only an adjunct to the Madonna; and so on. Hope particularly objected to the claim that in such pictures as Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi the mage is humbly contemplating the infant penis, unveiled by the Virgin, as proof of total humanation – as evidence that ...”

“... bien imité, were all really about the Raphael question. When Ernst Gombrich lectured on the Madonna della Sedia I was embarrassed to realise that none of the qualities in painting that were held to be cumulative and communal, in fact impersonal, had much meaning to me.The issue between Raphael and the Romantics was distorted by this very ...”

“... of the Raincoats, Björk or Patti Smith and, most curiously of all, only five hundred words on Madonna. There’s stuff about groupies, girls in boutiques and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads: ‘A large group of male fans stood as close to the stage as possible, transfixed by bass-player Tina Weymouth’s lunatic stare.’ remarks a reviewer, colluding with ...”

“... points to Northern prints and to a painting by Caroto, and there is also Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder), but the particular action depicted was entirely new. The outstretched arm of the child who rolls and wriggles on his mother’s lap is being inserted into the sleeve of a new home-made woollen jacket. Such scenes are familiar from the ...”

“... like a psychedelic remix of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. In one typical story, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Kim Basinger and Victoria Principal lounge around, bored, in a mansion in Santa Monica, chatting in Leith vernacular about their unrequited lust for Leith removal men, who have become international sex symbols: A pile of glossy magazines ...”