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“... precedents than the Venus. But even the Venus is different from the pictures by Giorgione, say, or Titian, which it superficially resembles. Both gods, as though caught in a contrary mood, fail to answer a primary question: ‘Who, what kind of person, are you?’ In neither picture can the face be read. Mars’ is in shadow, Venus’ is seen only in a blurred ...”

“... portraits was the basis of a regular trade. Some copies read as duets; in those Rubens made after Titian and Caravaggio one powerful voice sings along with another. Rubens’s copies never quite lose their Flemish accent but are often splendid in their own right. Like many translations, they show that the felicities a second language makes possible, however ...”

“... In its essentials this style was still Venetian. Colour is used in a way that was made possible by Titian in his later work: it seems to float on the surface of El Greco’s paintings, only half connected with the material world. And his combination of the graceful figural distortions of Parmigianino with brushwork and paint which are designed to be ...”

“... of this kind depends on direct painting. The portrait painters famous for telling likenesses – Titian, Velázquez, Hals – have not left many drawings. Those, like Holbein and Ingres, who have left elaborate studies for portraits or finished portrait drawings convince us that they are trying for a more solid truth than one of fleeting appearance – a ...”

“... is left is a small fraction of the total, unrepresentative and rarely in perfect condition. Titian’s ‘Portrait of a young woman in profile to the right’ (c.1510-15) By the 16th century, however, even preliminary drawings were prized for themselves and collected – two of those here are shown with the pen and wash frames Vasari put round them ...”

“... times, and Freud talks freely about his ambitions and procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently ...”

“... support this? Both Walden and Gombrich are convinced that the cleaning, over twenty years ago, of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne by the National Gallery was irresponsible. Walden writes of the ‘fragile tonal unity’ the painting possessed before cleaning. What surprises me is the underlying assumption that this was the same as, or even close to, the tonal ...”

“... came to them in old age and probably was proud of them. They follow the Antique even more than the Titian ‘Venus Anadyomene’ on which one of them is obviously based. Mrs Heleniak wants to place them in a Classical tradition: but it is their anomalous character that makes them interesting. Such nudes, over-large in relation to the rest of the painting, are ...”

“... the wooden sculpture of Jerome included in the exhibition, is naked, whereas Venus Anadyomene by Titian, in an attitude inspired by ancient sculpture but certainly also studied from a living model, is nude. It is a question not only of youth and beauty but of a figure that seems not to need clothing, who is ‘natural’ without it and free from awkwardness ...”

“... considered as the faithful representation of a particular scene; but they are far from equalling Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, &c. who have carried to the greatest perfection the ideal landscape, and whose pictures, instead of being the topographical representation of certain places, are the combined result of every thing beautiful in imagination or in ...”

“... regard to my appearance, and having regard also to my belief that a combination of El Greco, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyke and Renoir would not convert me into a beautiful object or, more importantly, an object of aesthetic interest – I have so often been pursued by artists, and artists of great quality, who wished to do a portrait of me. There ...”

“... until the close of the last century. Nor was the attention to narrative less important for Titian, Rubens or Poussin than it was for Hogarth. It might, moreover, be argued that it was precisely when there was a story to tell that the ‘pressure of style’ was least relaxed. When the young Berenson disparaged ‘illustration’, he was certainly ...”

“... image of a murderer from the hand prints of a child. Paton had studied the pagan lovers of Titian. He borrowed the fluttering cloak of the leaping Bacchus in the National Gallery for his Oberon in The Quarrel, and the tripping and tumbling fairy followers in both that painting and The Reconciliation owe something to Bacchus’ unruly rout. More often ...”

“... which like the Basket of Fruit was meant for the open market, were not Jesus and Mary but Titian and Poussin. Whereas in his writings Delacroix frowned on the mannerisms of Boucher, he could launch into wholesale Rococo fantasia in a canvas of Bathers in a woodland stream. Curiosity, perhaps, on the part of the Louvre’s most devoted student, who ...”