1. "It‘s the most grandiose, caricatural, corrosive demolition of the image of the Italian mamma," said Italy‘s leading daily Corriere della Sera.

2. With Homer, we feel no waste, just a succession of smaller or greater acts of possession, from the dazzlingly deft and dappled glimpse of two bonneted apple–pickers in Apple Picking (1878) to the oceanic appropriations of his later oils. (Among his feats might be listed the best, least caricatural portraits of postbellum African–Americans.) He beautifully exploited his talent and his days; a sense of strain and extravagance attends only the massive exclusion, from his art and, increasingly, from his life, of what might be called European civilisation.