“... 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 ...”

“... Franz, a minor character who is a Jew, hides all night in a cupboard ‘with a big plaster Madonna looking at him’. He starts to pray to the Madonna to save him: Then all at once he had wanted to laugh at the thought that he, Franz, was all dressed up as a monk and was praying to the ...”

“... displaying, with a gesture of triumphant accomplishment, a painting he has just executed of the Madonna and Child. An angel is shown marvelling at the image, sufficiently persuaded by its likeness that he (or she) spontaneously reaches out to touch the Madonna’s garment. Guercino was enough of an art historian to know ...”

“... to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The Chosen One, in which the newborn and naked baby lies on the ...”

“... of scalinate, staircases that rise high into the hills, flanked by statues of the Padre and the Madonna. Nearby, a Portakabin serves as the studio of the official radio station, La Voce di Padre Pio. There is normally a three-hour wait to get into the Chiesa, though we get in quite quickly thanks to the rain. The hushed queue snakes round the ...”

“... derived from the fact that the sheet had touched the original icon in Prato. Print represented the Madonna of Prato, but touch guaranteed her presence.Printed images​ or texts could also serve as a kind of warranty. Stamping things as a guarantee of provenance had long preceded woodblock printing. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘the Greeks knew only two ...”

“... programme of an author. ‘When I stand in the small graveyard at Monterchi before Piero’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, I know that I am present at a sacred (not simply a Christian) event. It is quite misleading to say that I am having an aesthetic experience. It would be more accurate to say that is is having me; I seem to do little more than provide an ...”

“... Child of 1886 but would focus on Munch’s run of iconic inventions from around 1893 – Puberty, Madonna, The Kiss and of course The Scream. Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye (until 14 October) goes out of its way not to be that show. Its curators, Clément Chéroux and Angela Lampe from the Centre Pompidou, have put on a capacious display, informed by a mission ...”

“... Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude due for her elucidation of why human beings are not in any way responsible for climate change, which her selected ‘real’ evidence shows isn’t happening anyway. We don’t have to be thankful ...”

“... Coming upon the Madonna di Loreto away from its proper home, the Church of Sant’ Agostino, is like finding an old neighbour wandering the streets in bedroom slippers. I saw her in Rome a few months ago. Meeting her in the Royal Academy, where she is one of the greatest of the 15 works by Caravaggio in The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623 (the exhibition runs until 20 April), I felt I should take her by the elbow and see her safely back to the church she was made for ...”

“... distinction Hollander draws between real dress, legendary costume and mythic drapery. Piero’s Madonna del Parto is in modern dress; later, in Leonardo’s Annunciation she is in a ‘new version of the fourth-to-14th-century kirtle and mantle’. Giotto’s shepherds suggest contemporary clothes, his nobler figures are caped much as classical statues ...”

“... at Ballinspittle in Ireland, where in 1985 a statue began wobbling before crowds of pilgrims, the Madonna’s message has been that however buffeted the faithful are by change, by reform, by the pressures and problems of modernity, she is on their side to help. The anthropologist William Christian Jr has explored the interpenetration of belief and ...”