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“... as a 35-year grand tour. Hamilton spent beyond his means on Roman vases, as well as paintings by Titian, Holbein and the many others that flooded the European market as the French aristocracy sold up. But to the surprise and irritation of Walpole and other friends, he also became fascinated to the point of obsession with the volcano. His official duties were ...”

“... as to let you rescue one and no more, you would plump for your grandparent, your grandchild or the Titian that so surprisingly shared houseroom with them. His new book takes, he says, ‘a broadly utilitarian position’, and it does nothing to shake my sneaking belief that the chief use of utilitarianism is to provide a decent intellectual cloak for souls too ...”

“... one. I would recommend Pope-Hennessy to consider the plays of Shakespeare or the paintings of Titian. This passage on Bandinelli arises out of a discussion of Cellini’s marble Ganymede. Pope-Hennessy reviews other 16th-century representations of the myth, including the famous finished drawing given by Michelangelo to Tommaso ...”

“... of their most acclaimed pictures). Magritte dabbled in forgery, too, not only of Old Masters (Titian, Hobbema) but also near contemporaries (Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Ernst, Arp, Klee); on occasion he tried his hand at new banknotes. He was often strapped for cash, so necessity was the spur to trickery.In the December 1929 issue of La Révolution ...”

“... the artist. Portraits of Bembo – or portraits that may be of him – abound, some by giants like Titian and others hard or impossible to assign. Commissioning works of art did not exhaust his energies. In his city house in Padua, he created a garden in which he cultivated rare herbs, ten years before the university established its Orto Botanico. Susan ...”

“... record, as opposed to the brilliant and spellbinding exception. (This isn’t to say Bull ignores Titian, Mantegna and Veronese – still less his beloved Poussin. He often has excellent things to say about them: his account of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, for instance, is a tour de force. He just will not allow the ...”

“... been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a triumphal progress from Titian to Tracey Emin, or historians of music celebrated a linear ascent in compositional quality from Bach to Birtwistle. It was, perhaps, in political history that historians first recognised their job to be something like interpreting the past in its own ...”

“... the Baptist and is an image of anguish, self-abnegation and loss. By contrast, when a visitor to Titian’s studio commented on his version of the penitent saint, all rosy and dewy and plump, Titian ‘answered laughing that he had painted her on the first day … before she began fasting, in order to be able to paint her ...”

“... art, but the tradition to which they belonged was emphatically European. They venerated Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Claude, Cuyp and would have laughed at the proposal to confine the curriculum to native artists. This strain of writing is unfortunate because it makes it possible to dismiss Fuller’s serious and well-presented case, made ...”

“... subjects better than the more artificial brilliancy of sunshine which enlightens the pictures of Titian. Learning by imitation and constructing a painting to achieve a calculated emotional effect is so alien to our present temper that I suspect the Counter-Reformation spirituality of the altar-pieces Reynolds admired, and even Annibale’s complex and ...”

“... mounted them. Clothes do acquire a true immortality in works of art. Bronzino and Gainsborough, Titian and Ingres, Holbein, Hals and all the others have amply registered centuries of sartorial genius. But when we stand and stare amazed at those incredible garments, no great tailors’ names leap to mind. All those precursors of Yves St Laurent were unsung ...”

“... lovely faces. These figures do have something of Braddon’s heroine, though some of Rossetti’s Titian-like beauties are more fatal-seeming and lusher; and Braddon probably saw those. In any case she evidently saw a deep fear of women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings that made an apt leitmotif for her chilling tale. Hughes, like Braddon herself, acknowledges the ...”

“... or drink, look like homosexual equivalents to the earlier courtesan paintings of Palma Vecchio and Titian, but the more disturbing pictures are of slightly later date, when the shadows have darkened – notably, the Victorious Cupid of 1601-2, destroyed in the Second World War, and the Young Baptist (Robb’s John in the Wild II) in the Capitoline Museum in ...”

“... to look and listen, we in ours are too insensitive to do so. Why make us think of meat only? A Titian of St Lawrence grilling, or the remark the saint is said to have uttered in that situation, does unite us in some degree in admiration for fortitude and martyrdom, the spirit rising above the flesh. Reductive, as today’s starkly honest propaganda ...”

“... of Disraeli’s Coningsby, would have been quite appropriate here: ‘Giorgione the gorgeous, Titian the golden, Rubens the ruddy and pulpy (the Pan of painting), some of Murillo’s beautiful shepherdesses, who smile on you out of darkness like a star, a few score first-class Leonardos.’ By 1847, when Thackeray’s parody appeared in Punch, Dickens had ...”