The face is not a flat description but a marvellous three-dimensional portrait of a handsome Italian living in real time, muscles beneath the skin, five o'clock shadow, not merely the usual patch of grey paint but something emerging from within.
On the South Downs above Brighton, after a long trek through fields of bored sheep, you reach C-Curve, a mirrored panopticon that surveys the view and plays tricks with your body as you attempt to understand how it has suddenly managed to segment the landscape into a triptych or redefine a patch of grey sky as a lake into which you see yourself tumbling headfirst.
In the aftermath of this week's rebellion by Tory MPs, both the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror were keen to draw attention to the patches of grey appearing towards the back of his bonce.
Famously, Vermeer created the illusion of the pearl against a patch of dark grey with just two bravura white brushstrokes: a bright highlight on the front, capturing light coming in from the window, and a subtler one lower down, showing the reflection of the girl's collar.
And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston's Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek.
I quickly get the job done, pull up my light grey slacks, move over to the mirror and immediately regret both the speed of my urination and my choice of trouser colour, as I look down to see a patch of dark grey spread across my crotch.
And there are suggestions of ground and shadow, between and around them, in the patches of darker grey and green.
He describes the fundus of the sperm whale as "mottled with patches of dark grey".
I looked at a tall, handsome specimen, its spreading upper limbs smooth ivory, stripped of bark, while lower down the process of bark-shedding in ribbons left an irregular pattern of stripes and patches in shades of grey, brown and red, with a ragged litter around the base.
The ear coverts appear as a grey patch of small feathers surrounded by red naked skin and the body plumage is silvery-grey.
A sufficient availability of temporary patches in the study area enabled a persistence of grey partridge populations without any support through hand-reared birds or systematic predator control.
