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Animal Happiness

Brigid Brophy, 5 June 1980

Practical Ethics 
by Peter Singer.
Cambridge, 237 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 521 22920 0
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... 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 ...

Geraniums and the River

Nicholas Penny, 20 March 1986

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers 
by T.J. Clark.
Thames and Hudson, 338 pp., £18, April 1985, 0 500 23417 5
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Cellini 
by John Pope-Hennessy.
Macmillan, 324 pp., £85, October 1985, 0 333 40485 8
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Alessandro Algardi 
by Jennifer Montagu.
Yale in association with the J. Paul Getty Trust, 487 pp., £65, May 1985, 0 300 03173 4
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... 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 ...

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
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... 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 ...

Locum, Lacum, Lucum

Anthony Grafton: The Emperor of Things, 13 September 2018

Pietro Bembo and the Intellectual Pleasures of a Renaissance Writer and Art Collector 
by Susan Nalezyty.
Yale, 277 pp., £50, May 2017, 978 0 300 21919 7
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Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist 
by Gareth Williams.
Oxford, 440 pp., £46.49, August 2017, 978 0 19 027229 6
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... 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 ...

Looking at the Ceiling

T.J. Clark: A Savonarolan Bonfire, 22 September 2005

The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art 
by Malcolm Bull.
Allen Lane, 465 pp., £30, April 2005, 9780713992007
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... 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 ...

Possessed by the Idols

Steven Shapin: Does Medicine Work?, 30 November 2006

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates 
by David Wootton.
Oxford, 304 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 19 280355 7
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... 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 ...

Multiplying Marys

Marina Warner: On Mary Magdalene, 22 February 2024

Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History 
by Philip C. Almond.
Cambridge, 347 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 1 009 22169 6
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Mary Magdalene: A Visual History 
by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona.
T&T Clark, 154 pp., £17.99, February 2023, 978 0 567 70574 7
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... 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 ...

Seeing through Fuller

Nicholas Penny, 30 March 1989

Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace 
by Peter Fuller.
Chatto, 260 pp., £15, November 1988, 0 7011 2942 5
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Seeing through Berger 
by Peter Fuller.
Claridge, 176 pp., £8.95, November 1988, 1 870626 75 3
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Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. Vol. IX: Since the Second World War 
edited by Boris Ford.
Cambridge, 369 pp., £19.50, November 1988, 0 521 32765 2
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Ruskin’s Myths 
by Dinah Birch.
Oxford, 212 pp., £22.50, August 1988, 9780198128724
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The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the 19th Century 
edited by J.B. Bullen.
Oxford, 230 pp., £27.50, March 1989, 0 19 812884 3
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Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought 
by Mark Swenarton.
Macmillan, 239 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 333 46460 5
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... 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 ...

So, puss, I shall know you another time

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1988

The World through Blunted Sight 
by Patrick Trevor-Roper.
Allen Lane, 207 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7139 9006 6
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Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction 
by Carl Goldstein.
Cambridge, 244 pp., £40, September 1988, 0 521 34331 3
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Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce 
Cape, 192 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 224 02484 1Show More
Portrait of David Hockney 
by Peter Webb.
Chatto, £17.95, November 1988, 0 7011 3401 1
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... 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 ...

Wear and Tear

Anne Hollander, 6 February 1997

Yves St Laurent: A Biography 
by Alice Rawsthorn.
HarperCollins, 405 pp., £20, November 1996, 0 00 255543 3
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... 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 ...

As Good as Nude

Anne Hollander: Women in White, 6 April 2006

Dressed in Fiction 
by Clair Hughes.
Berg, 214 pp., £17.99, December 2005, 1 84520 172 8
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... 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 ...

Models and Props

Nicholas Penny: Caravaggio in the Studio, 10 August 2000

Caravaggio 
by Catherine Puglisi.
Phaidon, 448 pp., £24.95, May 2000, 0 7148 3966 3
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Caravaggio’s Secrets 
by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit.
MIT, 118 pp., £18.50, September 1998, 0 262 02449 7
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by Peter Robb.
Bloomsbury, 567 pp., £25, January 2000, 0 7475 4599 5
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Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History 
by Mieke Bal.
Chicago, 305 pp., £28.50, October 1999, 0 226 03556 5
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Doubting Thomas: A Novel About Caravaggio 
by Atle Naess, translated by Anne Born.
Owen, 159 pp., £14.95, June 2000, 0 7206 1082 6
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Caravaggio: A Life 
by Helen Langdon.
Pimlico, 447 pp., £15, November 1999, 9780712665827
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... 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 ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
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Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
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‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
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Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
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Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
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The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
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Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
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Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
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... 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 ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... 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 ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... and in the company of her fellow modernists she turned into an ‘astonishing’ figure ‘with Titian hair … and a mellifluous flow of polysyllables which held every man in awe’ (as Kreymborg described her). After the five lean years during which no editor bothered to acknowledge her poems almost everyone (of her kind) wanted to publish them. Though ...

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