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and finds especially powerful expression in the writings of the early followers of St Francis of Assisi. A good example is an early Franciscan tract entitled the Little Book on the Meditation on the Passion of Christ Divided According to Seven Hours of the Day, which describes the exercise thus: ‘It is necessary that when you concentrate on these things in your contemplation, you do so as if you were actually present at the very time when he suffered. And in grieving you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.’28

A late thirteenth-century guide to prayer entitled Meditations on the Life of Christ, probably written by a Franciscan friar from Tuscany, vividly demonstrates how such practices developed. The process involved ever more complicated and detailed visualizations, so that a succession of almost cinematic images would follow, one after another, in the mind:

reflect on the benignity of the Lord in having to sustain persecution so soon and in such a way … He was carried to Egypt by the very young and tender mother, and by the aged saintly Joseph, along wild roads, obscure, rocky and difficult, through woods and uninhabited places – a very long journey. It is said that couriers would take thirteen or fifteen days; for them it was perhaps two months or longer. They are also said to have gone by way of the desert, which the children of Israel traversed and in which they stayed forty years. How did they carry food with them? And where did they rest and stay the night? Very seldom did they find a house in that desert. Have pity on them, for it was a very difficult, great and long exertion for them as well as for the Child Jesus. Accompany them and help to carry the Child and serve them in every way you can … Here there comes a beautiful and pious, compassionate meditation … These and other things about the boy Jesus you can contemplate. I have given you the occasion and you can enlarge it and follow it as you please.29

The rise of this form of popular devotion was closely linked to the development of painting, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout Western European Christendom, and especially in Italy and the Low Countries, artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building. The common goal was to summon up the events described in the New Testament as vividly as possible, so that devout Christians might imagine themselves present as actors at the scene – mourning the dead Christ, for example, or helping to tend him as an infant on the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, as the author of Meditations on the Life of Christ had written. Religious painting and religious meditation were, in fact, branches of the same activity.30

But by the middle years of the sixteenth century the relationship between art and religious contemplation in Italy had become less straightforward. In the more sophisticated artists’ circles, the idea of appealing to the popular devotional imagination with images of painstaking realism was regarded with disdain. Art became seen instead as an idealized, generalized language for the expression of higher thought. Michelangelo, the outstanding painter-sculptor of the High Renaissance, deliberately distanced himself from the pious naturalism of earlier religious painting, which he associated above all with the oil painting traditions of Flanders: ‘They paint in Flanders,’ he contemptuously remarked in the 1540s, ‘only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill. Their painting is of stuffs, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there. And