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“... once and for all, to the notion that Cassatt is nothing but a purveyor of sentimental, secularised Madonna and Child images for the mass market. Although, later in life, she specialised in mothers and children, as Griselda Pollock points out, the images are usually freshly observed and modern in their psychological understanding of the relationship, as well as ...”

“... did to other luxury accessories, such as the Islamic carpet and pagan Greek reliefs with which the Madonna is in this case also – and no less conspicuously – supplied. A lamp or an egg given special prominence – for instance, serving as a device on the reverse of a medal or on the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of ...”

“... sad blue and pink people, but more substantial. Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be ...”

“... the NHS ward that serves as a site of spiritual desolation in Memento Mori (1959). In ‘The Black Madonna’, a story published in 1958, a Catholic couple’s creed, it’s suggested, is at odds with their materialist smugness, a smugness that’s given a very specific satirical colouring: The Parkers were among the few tenants of Cripps House who owned a ...”

“... epigraphs: from Marilyn Monroe, Kafka, Lenny Bruce (who occupies an entire page), Billy Wilder, Madonna (or the ‘popular singer Madonna Ciccone’, as Smith has it, a tic that runs throughout the book), Walter Benjamin (or ‘the popular wise guy Walter Benjamin’). Each chapter has a cute digest at its ...”

“... best attested early works. The figures are strangely tentative and childish, and only the Madonna has any personality at all, a rather sentimental one. The landscape, on the other hand, is beautiful in places, and utterly different from that of any painting known to have been made in Venice in the first decade of the 16th century. The dating of the ...”

“... and for his knack for hanging out with all the right people (Haring! Debbie Harry! Burroughs! Madonna!). Pieces about him often adopt a breathy, tragic tone. ‘Did he have a chance?’ one reviewer of the Barbican show asked. ‘Did all those punk luminaries ever think to stop him taking drugs?’ The first painting the visitor sees – to one side of ...”

“... twenties in the first picture. Around that time he was painting both devotional works like Gypsy Madonna (seen here), in which the reserve and modesty of the Virgins of his erstwhile master Giovanni Bellini is replaced by a more robust humanity, and pastoral pieces like the Louvre Concert champêtre (long attributed to Giorgione, now more often to ...”

“... Ilaria to which Beck thinks we must not pay too much attention are also evident, however, in the Madonna and Child that Jacopo carved for Ferrara at a slightly earlier date. Here they lighten the massive folds of cloak over the Virgin’s knees and give a spring to the pose of the Child who stands on her lap. Even the little pointed shoe which emerges from ...”

“... with repulsion), jealousy, separation, melancholy, anxiety; there is a blissfully sensual Madonna from 1894-95 (a foetus and spermatozoa decorate the frame in a lithographed version). These pictures are all in one way or another autobiographical. When Munch paints figures in a landscape that carry those feelings, or even unpeopled landscapes, it is ...”

“... with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black Madonna of Czestochowa) and Old Catholic. The Old Catholics are pretty well spread about the world. During the last war they were helpful to Anglicans in Java and even in Nazi Germany: their Dutch and Swiss congregations support an Anglican diocese in South ...”

“... This is precisely what he did on his return to Rome, where, between 1518 and 1521, he carved the Madonna del Parto for Santa Maria del Pepolo – perhaps the most monumental of all the sculptures of this subject created in the Renaissance, not excepting those by Michelangelo, whose Virgins in Bruges and in the Medici Chapel are more vulnerable in mood and ...”

“... the door behind the bar, was the church of Notre-Dame du Finistère, which housed a statue of the Madonna and Child in oak and walnut; a 15th-century devotional figurehead shipped to Brussels from Aberdeen. It must have been a nice refinement to lie in bed, in post-coital reverie, listening to the sanctified chime of the neighbourhood bells. The ...”

“... in 1807 – was lugged up Vesuvius in a sedan chair by relays of guides, one of whom, Salvatore Madonna, was still complaining of shoulder strain as he recalled the ascent years later to Buckingham’s nephew. After the difficulty of the journey up there was a temptation to take the easy – if undignified – way down by sitting back and sliding. Small ...”

“... ascribed to Yeats’s religious images. In ‘Our Lady of Youghal’, a lost ivory plaque of the Madonna and Child lies underground but appears to orchestrate its own dazzling rediscovery (‘inside a tower of leaves,/the virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting /behind lids of gold, bursting out of the wood’).There’s an elegiac strain in much of ...”