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The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize or generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself. Collectively, the chapels of the sacro monte exemplified an ancient, pious fairground form of realism – a type of art that has in general been overlooked or avoided by most art historians precisely because of its naked and self-conscious ‘vulgarity’. Yet the art of the sacro monte also had strong roots in traditions of high artistic realism going back to the start of the Renaissance. This was a tradition that had produced the sculpturally immediate, emotionally vivid and highly theatrical fourteenth-century paintings of Giotto – which themselves had strong links with certain forms of sacred drama, miracle plays and the like, promoted by the Franciscans and other orders of mendicant friars; as well as the startlingly lifelike fifteenth-century sculptures of Donatello, creations such as the Mary Magdalen or the Habakkuk, which struck his contemporaries as so eerily imbued with human presence that he was even suspected of necromancy.

This tradition of the work of art as, essentially, a speaking likeness intended to bring the Bible to life was displaced during the later Renaissance – or, at least, it was so transformed by the values and imperatives of the High Renaissance, of Michelangelo and Raphael and the Mannerists who came after them, that its original, uncanny effects were greatly diminished. Yet it continued to thrive away from the perceived centres of art such as Rome or Florence. In Emilia-Romagna and throughout Lombardy, unsettlingly realistic groups of figures were created by a school of sculptors working in the malleable and highly expressive medium of terracotta. Their art is still insufficiently appreciated, but a sculptor such as Guido Mazzoni from Modena, whose breathtakingly emotive works can still be seen in churches across northern Italy – and indeed as far south as Naples – deserves to be ranked alongside any of his better-known contemporaries. The traditions of the highly realized terracotta sculpture, and of the sacro monte, played a crucial role in shaping the imagination of pious Italians in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Both traditions were also deeply influential on Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s mature paintings, such as The Crucifixion of St Peter and The Conversion of St Paul, are blatantly rooted in the traditions of popular pious realism that produced the sculptures of the sacred mountain and the freestanding groups created by Mazzoni and other such masters. So clear and direct is the connection, so manifest the visual resemblance, that it might even be said that his principal strategy as a religious artist was to translate the effects of these two particular branches of theatrical sculpture into the painting of his time. The way in which he paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna – so much so that some of the older faces in his painting might almost have been copied direct from sources in terracotta sculpture.

Caravaggio’s fondness for going into gruesome, visceral detail – his depiction, for example, of the gouts of blood that spurt from the decapitated tyrant’s head in Judith and Holofernes – also vividly testifies to the affinity between his art and the rowdy, bloody, popular spectacle of much sacro monte imagery. But even more telling is his constant habit of framing and composing scenes as though confined within a single, small, contained, theatrical space. There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place indoors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room in which he can control the action and rigorously limit the cast of actors – a space analogous to the densely