'In this talk MB discusses Proust's handling of Italian artists in A la recherche du temps perdu, paying particular attention to Giotto, Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio and Botticelli. More often than not, Proust's Italian painters enter the force-field of his fiction at the point where their works have ceased to be pictorially arresting or exigent: they are the custodians of artistic meaning that has been lost, diluted or trivialised, and their works are plundered by a literary imagination in search of re-workable building materials for its own grand project. Looking closely at the minority of cases where the sensuous bite of visual experience is in part at least preserved, MB argues that even here there are problems for the art enthusiast and visual sensation-seeker. Proust creates a fascinating criss-cross of personal and collective cultural maps. Botticelli helps Swann to tell his own story, and Swann in his turn helps the narrator to tell his. This constant emphasis on the mediatedness of artistic vision, and the greed with which a major tradition in European painting is subdued by Proust's narrator to the needs of personal retrospection and self-analysis is presented as a crisis of the art-historical imagination. Proust offers a precarious new form of custodianship for art-works by placing them in an imaginary museum of his own creating, and by allowing them to be dissolved into an ever-mutating fictional texture.'