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“... The career of Leonardo da Vinci must be the most intimidating subject in the history of art. The paintings and preparatory drawings are a major topic in themselves, and any monograph on Leonardo the artist invites comparison with Kenneth Clark’s classic study, one of the best books of its type. Then there are the notebooks, a written legacy unparalleled in scale and range among surviving records of the Renaissance ...”

“... A few days​ before his death in Rome in 1564 Michelangelo is said to have destroyed all the drawings in his house. He had done something similar on at least three previous occasions. But despite his efforts more than two hundred drawings are almost universally accepted today as being wholly or in part by his hand, and most experts would argue for a much higher figure ...”

“... Florence has always​ been at the heart of any history of Renaissance art. The two most obvious reasons for this are the survival, especially in the city itself, of a very large number of works of art from that period, and the influence of Vasari’s Lives, which is mainly about Florentine artists. For the 15th century, the period of Masaccio, Botticelli and the young Leonardo da Vinci, the other major city in Italy which has received most attention from art historians is Venice, but until the last third of the 15th century the survival rate of paintings there seems to have been much less, and partly for that reason Venetian art before 1500 has traditionally occupied a secondary role ...”

“... of the supreme masterpieces of Italian painting. But after the sale of the Gonzaga collection to Charles I in 1629 they suffered increasingly from neglect. As the result of a series of disastrously misconceived restorations, culminating in the bizarre decision to immerse them completely in paraffin wax, the canvases eventually became all but ...”

“... The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity ...”

“... There used to be a widespread practice in Italy, particularly in the 1960s and in Tuscany, of removing baroque additions of all kinds from old churches, in a usually implausible attempt to restore them to something resembling their medieval appearance. This led to the destruction or dispersal of many fine works of art, and often gave the restored buildings an empty appearance they had probably never previously had, or been meant to have ...”

“... A friend of mine recently went to see Pisanello’s fresco of St George and the Princess in the Church of Sant’ Anastasia in Verona. She was soon accosted by the sacristan, who was eager to tell her the story. When he realised that she already knew it, he asked, ‘Do you want the allegory?’ and proceeded to explain that St George symbolised the Pope, the Princess was the Church, the dragon Heresy, and so on ...”

“... Until​ the Reformation virtually all Western Christians permitted and even encouraged the use of religious imagery, following in this respect the example of the pagans rather than the Jews. The most famous justification for the practice appears in two letters written by Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century to Serenus, bishop of Marseille ...”

“... On 6 November​ , after ten days of legal argument in the High Court, judgment was handed down in the dispute over the University of London’s obligations towards the Warburg Institute. The institute developed out of the private library of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), a wealthy art historian in Hamburg, who was supported by his four brothers, all of them bankers ...”

“... of 1877, biographies of Titian have almost invariably been biographies of his pictorial style. Charles Hope’s book, although in scope and ambition much more restricted than Crowe’s and Cavalcaselle’s, marks in this respect a most welcome change. It is the first truly informative account of Titian’s life published in English in recent ...”

“... Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or lubricity. That he greatly enjoyed researching, writing and defending ...”

“... of Venus and The Andrians for Alfonso d’Este, he found a way of telling stories which, as Charles Hope puts it in the introductory essay to the catalogue, ‘has proved so seductive that we still see mythology through the eyes of Titian and his later imitators’.Contemplative, even slightly melancholy pastoral has been replaced by a dance-like ...”

“... between Paul III and Ottavio, and that for that reason the picture may have displeased the pope. Charles Hope, in his Titian of 1980, rightly dismissed this sort of interpretation as anachronistic, adding that Titian was the ‘last person to indulge in such criticism of his sitters, least of all when he was trying to obtain favour from them’. Hale ...”

“... was present in a discussion of Piero by a colleague of Baxandall at the Warburg Institute, Charles Hope, published in the London Review of Books in March 1983 (Vol. 5, No 5). Both Baxandall and Hope point out that a function of this kind is hard to reconcile with the esoteric symbolism and concealed topical ...”

“... though she inhabits a 16th-century bedroom and confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as ...”