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“... There was no limit to Koresh’s sexual ambitions. Taped to his motorcycle was a photograph of Madonna, who Koresh believed would eventually hear about the Davidians, move to Mount Carmel, fall in love with him and become one of his wives. He told one of his lieutenants that God had spoken to him in a dream and said, ‘I will give thee ...”

“... take to make a Medieval non-European of no particular personal charm as much a household name as Madonna? Could it be the teenage murder of a half-brother, the abandonment of his young wife to his enemies to save his skin, the execution of his closest friend, a blood-brother since childhood, by dismemberment, and (in all probability) the poisoning of his ...”

“... book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has ...”

“... than the plot, which is 100 per cent cumin-coated tripe. Elizabeth Lowry’s The Bellini Madonna, mercifully, is set not in a Venice that’s trying to be a fake Canaletto but in a ‘17th-century manor house with Victorian accretions’, which a few pages later acquires ‘two sweeping Georgian side elevations’, and later still has ‘tall Gothic ...”

“... with great interest, at self-revelation and where its limits lie. I had hopes of Sex. Wouldn’t Madonna offer us her limitless confidence and dispel my nagging doubt that we all suffer from nagging doubts? Wouldn’t she be saying: you’ve had the public stuff, now here’s the raw material, the motherlode. All of it’s worth having, and therefore all of ...”

“... on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes. But what really made ...”

“... calculated near-miss’; if she is concealing it with drapery, the picture is one in which ‘the Madonna unveils the Child or decks its [sic] loins with attention-gathering ceremony.’ Professor Steinberg, in fact, seems to find a genital focus in every representation of the Madonna and Child in which the child is not ...”

“... recently issued a book the size of a telephone directory called Supernatural Visions of the Madonna 1981-91. The desktop publication was heralded by large ads in various papers featuring the visionary. Sister Marie or Sofia Marie Gabriel: her revelations and secrets could save mankind. In the book, the author includes a poem, called ‘Child Mystic ...”

“... and expensive use of gold leaf across the whole background, and the golden crown placed on the Madonna’s head, again suggest that there is no conflict between money and sanctity. Despite this reconciliation of sacred and profane in coin, statute book and altarpiece – three of the opening exhibits in a show at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence which I ...”

“... Ruskin on Bellini: The art of Bellini is centrally represented by two pictures at Venice: one, the Madonna in the sacristy of the Frari; the second, the Madonna with four saints, over the second altar of San Zaccaria. In the first of these, the figures are under life size, and it represents the most perfect kind of picture ...”

“... is not much encouraged. So it is exhilarating to be shown how, underneath the repainting, the Madonna of the Humility in Washington really looks as if it is by Masaccio, or to compare the drapery folds in the bust of Francesco Sassetti with those favoured by Verrocchio. Then there is that powerful little bronze figure in the Bargello, known as the ...”

“... the picture isn’t, as Bernard Berenson suggested, a copy). Attributed to Umberto Giunti, ‘Madonna of the Veil’, 1920-29 Then there is the Madonna of the Veil, bought expensively by Lord Lee of Fareham in 1930 and bequeathed to the Courtauld Institute in 1947. It was accepted by London experts in the 1930s as a ...”

“... icon was borne into the Bogoyavlensky Sobor, the Cathedral of the Epiphany, in Moscow. The Madonna of Vladimir, a 12th-century depiction of the infant Jesus resting on the arm of an abstracted Madonna, was delivered to the church by Zil minibus. In spite of his recent heart trouble, Patriarch Alexei of Moscow and All ...”

“... most people would also have had one or more religious pictures in their house, usually of the Madonna or Christ and often of very modest artistic quality, so the evidential value of surviving pictures of this type for the state of painting in particular centres is limited. There was also a substantial amount of painted decoration in public buildings, such ...”

“... the Tuscan church where Piero della Francesca painted his fresco of the pregnant Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto. But the scene wasn’t shot there. James Macgillivray, in his contribution to a new volume of essays edited by Nathan Dunne, tells us that Tarkovsky had a reproduction of Piero’s painting installed in the crypt of another Romanesque church ...”