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Borromeo did not entirely succeed in his efforts to turn Milan into a model Tridentine police state. Even though he had the firm support of the pope and, eventually, Philip II of Spain, some of his attempts to redesign the Milanese way of life met with angry resistance. He tried in vain to ban dancing on feast days and Sundays, and in 1579 he even attempted to kill off the exuberantly joyful pre-Lenten tradition of Carnival. To the disgust of many Milanese citizens, he prohibited all jousts, tournaments, masquerades, plays and dances, and declared the automatic excommunication of all those participating in or attending such spectacles. Borromeo regarded Carnival as the devil’s work, a dissolute rite lodged like a parasite at the beginning of the holy season. His prohibition was backed up by the threat that his confessors would exploit their information-gathering networks to identity those who had taken part in the celebrations. But this time he had gone too far. Borromeo’s attempt to shut down the festive life of the city was met with panic by the civic authorities and rage by the people. Rome and Spain both had to intervene to prevent a popular uprising and Borromeo was forced, reluctantly, to acknowledge that there were limits to his power. In the end, the Milanese were content to fall short of spiritual perfection.

THE POWER OF THE IMAGE

For all his inflexibility, Borromeo was an immensely charismatic and transformative individual. He changed his world, and has been rightly remembered as one of the most dynamic figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Ludwig von Pastor, author of The History of the Popes, ‘he stands as a milestone in the history of the Church, at the boundary line between two epochs, the dying Renaissance and the triumphant Catholic reform.’26 As the first resident Archbishop of Milan for nearly a century, he cast a giant shadow over the city throughout the 1570s and early 1580s.

There is good reason to believe that the acts and ideas of Carlo Borromeo played a profound part in the formation of Caravaggio – an artist whose greatest gift would be an unprecedentedly stark and vivid naturalism, deeply attuned to the ideals of Counter-Reformation piety that permeated the city of his youth. Borromeo embodied more than just a particularly direct and messianic form of piety. His faith was rooted in an intense, spectacularly visual imagination. Borromeo’s way of believing in Christ – which involved putting Christ at the centre of his life not in an abstract way, but as actually as possible – depended essentially on a process of mental projection identical to that required in painting pictures.

In early life Borromeo had been strongly influenced by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola. He had read and followed Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, a work that placed great emphasis on the role of visualization in Christian meditation. Loyola specifically advised his readers to visualize Christ’s sufferings, insisting that the necessary prelude to any deep and serious meditation on Christ’s Life and Passion was a mental process that he termed ‘composition, seeing the place’. What that involved was, in effect, a kind of internalized version of the act of painting itself: ‘In contemplation or meditation on visual things, as in contemplating Christ our Lord, who is visible, composition will be to see by the eye of the imagination a physical place where that thing is found which I wish to contemplate. By a physical place I mean, for example, a temple or mountain, where Jesus Christ, or Our Lady is found, according to that which I wish to contemplate.’27

The Ignatian belief in the power of visualization carried within it the implication that if worshippers can see the image of Christ in their mind’s eye, then they can empathize with his sufferings all the more fully – opening themselves to that emotional involvement which leads to the deeper forms of meditative experience. But the idea was not new to Loyola. It goes back to the Middle Ages,