As if standing before Julius

Nicholas Penny, 7 April 1994

Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance 
by John Shearman.
Princeton, 281 pp., £35, October 1992, 0 691 09972 3Show More
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“... to carry meaning. A sash passes diagonally across the drapery of the Virgin in Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck in the Uffizi. A similar band passes in the opposite direction across the breast of the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà. It seems probable that Michelangelo had seen the quiver straps in antique marble statues of Diana, although these ...”

Can you feel it?

Rose Boyt, 28 September 1989

“... they had were rubbish but we still enjoyed ourselves. About the heaviest groove they had was Madonna. It was mental. It doesn’t matter, being uncool. Ibiza used to be good. Amnesia used to be a good club, but now it’s full of lager louts on E wearing psychedelic shorts. Not my cup of tea. I find the whole thing much more exciting than punk. Punks ...”

Diary

John Lloyd: Long weekend in Yaroslavl, 20 July 1995

“... in the area, had been woken from his sleep on the bank of the Volga to see an apparition of the Madonna, not once, but twice. This miracle had caused him to found the nunnery, which was built up in the 17th and 18th centuries into a fine walled haven, with two large churches in the middle. The Bolshevik period had done for it. In 1928 the remaining priests ...”

Diary

Sandy Steele: Topless in Hong Kong, 2 October 1997

“... businessmen. All it involves is wearing a silly outfit, drinking heavily and impersonating Madonna on the karaoke. The only skill you need is the ability to pretend you’re in love with the man sitting next to you. My family had some difficulty believing this wasn’t a front for blatant prostitution, but the travellers I met in Thailand assured me ...”

Hustling off the Crockery

John Bayley: Kipling’s history of the Great War., 4 June 1998

The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion 
by Rudyard Kipling.
Spellmount, 320 pp., £24.95, January 1997, 1 873376 72 3Show More
The Irish Guards in the Great War: The Second Battalion 
by Rudyard Kipling.
Spellmount, 223 pp., £24.95, January 1998, 1 873376 83 9Show More
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“... be tossed and retossed in stale desolation’. The most memorable of these stories is ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, which recalls a regimental diary’s observations on the layers and generations of corpses – French, English, German – encountered in grave-digging. To an amateur psychiatrist a shell-shocked casualty after the war pretends with ...”

On Thatcher

“... time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992The picture​ which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were ...”

Halifax hots up

Colin Burrow: Writing (and reading) charitably, 21 October 2004

Havoc, in Its Third Year 
by Ronan Bennett.
Bloomsbury, 244 pp., £16.99, September 2004, 0 7475 6249 0Show More
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“... with palm leaves, in imitation of Christ; Brigge, at the head of his liberated prisoners, leads a madonna (his wet-nurse) and child into neighbouring towns. He is at last set on and beaten to death for blasphemy, and seems for all the world to be another of Bennett’s failed revolutionaries. But he is more than that, or at least something different from ...”

Dan Dare at the Cosmos Ballroom

John Hartley Williams, 8 July 2004

“... are female arms flung straight above her head, enclosed by glossy foliage: a goddess of the cliff, madonna, sacred prostitute of the ravine. The Mekon blasts me from his dream: Disaster isn’t vegetable, you fool! I grip a ledge, securely lodge my boots. My hesitation turns her back into a tree. The noise of time is visible from here, bouncing off the chasm ...”

Down the Telescope

Nicholas Penny: The Art of Imitation, 24 January 2019

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War 
by Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Yale, 286 pp., £45, June 2017, 978 0 300 22275 3Show More
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“... The format was also familiar from engravings and copies of Raphael’s paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, with its central ...”

Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas, 22 June 2000

On Beauty and Being Just 
by Elaine Scarry.
Princeton, 134 pp., $15.95, September 1999, 0 691 04875 4Show More
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues, 216 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 9637264 5 5Show More
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“... constantly changing, even within the same medium. The symmetry manifested by Cimabue’s gigantic Madonna, or Duccio’s immense Christ-child, and the small saints who surround them, differs in kind from the symmetry expressed by Bellini’s geometrically proportioned figures. A la recherche de temps perdu closes by showing that all the divergent paths it has ...”

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

“... Lopez, Angelina Jolie) were familiarising the public with an Olympian, virago ideal. Madonna, no giantess, is more muscular than Marilyn Monroe or Joan Crawford was. But it would be a mistake to think that fashionable ideas of beauty and appropriate appearances are sealed from realities; rather, the new acknowledgment of female physical strength ...”

It’s. Not. Real.

Chal Ravens: Britney fights back, 22 January 2026

The Woman in Me 
by Britney Spears.
Simon and Schuster, 275 pp., £9.99, July 2024, 978 1 3985 2254 1Show More
Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly 
by Jeff Weiss.
MCD, 388 pp., £15.99, July 2025, 978 0 374 60613 8Show More
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“... in 2007, she had released five albums, starred in a movie, been the face of Pepsi, snogged Madonna, filled her mantelpiece with awards and broken sales records around the world. She’d also become a tabloid fixture, labelled ‘sick’, ‘out of control’, a ‘time bomb’. The Hollywood fairy tale had turned Southern Gothic. As punishment for her ...”

Ghosts in the Machine

Michael Dibdin, 5 February 1987

Slaves of New York 
by Tama Janowitz.
Picador, 278 pp., £3.50, January 1987, 0 330 29753 8Show More
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“... intellectually as well as emotionally. Bob was both sadist and masochist to me; for him I was madonna and whore. Life with him was never dull.’ The lead story in Slaves of New York reads like a come-on for a quite different book, featuring a cast of hip mutants strong on style, heavy sex and drugs, and ‘caring less’. Such a book would no doubt be ...”

Wallpaper and Barricades

Terry Eagleton, 23 February 1995

William Morris: A Life for Our Time 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 780 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 571 14250 8Show More
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“... culture, culture has now almost entirely absorbed politics. There is a good deal more interest in Madonna than in the multinationals. There was always, however, an alternative heritage. The young Marx owed much of his critique of capitalism to the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller, and aesthetic notions lurk within the political and economic thought of his ...”

Upward Mobility

Bruce Boucher, 31 March 1988

Venetian Villas 
by Michelangelo Muraro.
Rizzoli, 514 pp., $85, January 1987, 0 8478 0762 2Show More
Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 
by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak.
Princeton, 247 pp., £37.60, February 1988, 0 691 04047 8Show More
The Painful Birth of the Art Book 
by Francis Haskell.
Thames and Hudson, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 500 55019 0Show More
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“... Their moral qualities were underscored by the presence of paintings with subjects such as the Madonna in a garland of flowers or Christ’s healing of the blind man. Those studying the pictures can be identified as gentlemen or possibly noblemen by their accoutrements of swords and staffs: the galleries and their inhabitants appear to reinforce a concept ...”
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