“... totality of phenomena saluted whenever his great Italian predecessors, from Giotto to Raphael and Titian, painted narrative. ‘Nature’ might be a label for that broad vision, in which whole figures represented the norm. But in Caravaggio’s trajectory, nature gets drastically reduced. At first he depicts no more than what you can immediately see, then ...”

“... in 1870 (now in the Tate Gallery’s collection, but not on display), next to The Concert by Titian (perhaps with another artist), then generally considered to be by Giorgione. Both paintings show figures at a keyboard, which is placed at the bottom left corner of the canvas. The connection, once made, seems obvious, although we may wonder whether many ...”

“... earliest stylistic affinities may still be discerned, but this painting is far closer to the young Titian (whose paintings were to be set beside it) than it is to Mantegna. Amid the brilliant colours of the draperies, heightened by the repeated whites of the linen, and the dark foil of the wood, the broken water and the lights on metal and glass and porcelain ...”

“... much to say about the import of paintings for royal and aristocratic collectors – paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, Bosch, Rubens and so on, not to mention the import of prints by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi (best-known for his engravings after Raphael). Brown has even more to say about the import of artists. The leading ...”

“... paint followed the ‘revelation of great painting’ which he received in 1919 while looking at Titian in the Galleria Borghese, and this was one encounter with tradition that was highly fruitful, rejuvenating a genius which had been showing signs of drying up. Certainly, it often led him to ludicrous rhetoric, but also to the use of feathery, atmospheric ...”

“... of paintings – illustrated by a ‘gallery’ of paintings and their tributary poems: Aretino on Titian, Rossetti on Leonardo, Baudelaire on Callot, Donald Hall on Munch, Hollander on Monet and dozens more, including Richard Wilbur’s exquisitely meditative imitation of a Baroque wall fountain, a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than ...”

“... tricks are performed during his musings on and around the Pre-Raphaelites. Of Dyce’s painting ‘Titian’s First Essay in Colour’ he says: ‘Dyce sets young Titian in a recognisably English churchyard.’ Once again his own illustration gives him the lie. English garden it may be. Churchyard (of any nationality) it ...”

“... light or glow with it, and he never painted cherubim, which in the sacred paintings of Raphael, Titian or Correggio are as inseparable from light as bubbles from water. Other Italian artists, including the Carracci, greatly valued the divine glow which Caravaggio rejected. They tried, for instance, to imitate the way Correggio had given flesh a texture and ...”

“... are dictated by belief. The texture of that belief is reflected in Bacon’s comments apropos a Titian painting to a BBC interviewer (as recorded by Peppiatt): ‘We don’t only live our life, as it were, in the material and physical sense; we live it through our whole nervous system, which is, of course, also only a physical thing, but it’s a whole kind ...”

“... work on which the consecration of the centuries seems to have placed the patina of a Rembrandt, a Titian or a Velázquez’. Despite the acclaim, the painting was hung in a dingy back room at the Luxembourg. It was resurrected in 1932, when the Museum of Modern Art brought it to the United States to tour the country: huge crowds gathered to see it. In ...”

“... it exhibits ‘serenity’ or even ‘transcendence’. Heinrich Wölfflin could say of Titian that because he had been ‘over the ground which contained the necessary preliminary stages’ he could incorporate ‘perfectly new possibilities in his final style’. And the aged Goethe was another model, this time of calm acceptance, serenity after a ...”

“... works by the best artists and he amassed significant pieces by Holbein, Bronzino, Bellini, Titian, Veronese, El Greco, Bruegel, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, Manet, Degas and Whistler. He wasn’t just a collector of paintings, however, and left substantial holdings of drawings, Italian Renaissance ...”

“... None of this prepares us for the final chapter entitled ‘Painting, Metaphor and the Body: Titian, Bellini, De Kooning, etc’. Here we learn that ‘one constituent of corporeality, which is an optional aspect, for corporeality does not insist on it, is that a picture endowed with corporeality will get itself thought of – thought of ...”

“... although the links with the works of Giorgione and those of his slightly younger contemporary Titian are evident. In the summer of 1511 Sebastiano moved to Rome at the invitation of a wealthy banker named Agostino Chigi, who wanted him to contribute to the decoration of his new house beside the Tiber, now known as the Villa Farnesina. He could hardly have ...”

“... and Filippo Baldinucci asserted that her ‘portraits after nature’ were second only to those of Titian. The value placed on Sofonisba’s work was inextricable from the fact of its creation by a member of the lesser sex.At the same time, it was subtly demeaned, because while women like Sofonisba were diligent and accurate, capable of recording what they saw ...”