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To say this is to deny neither Caravaggio’s virtuosity nor his powers of invention. The way in which he adapted the conventions of popular sculpture to painting, the way in which he made them thoroughly pictorial – above all through his use of light and shade – was so original that it gave painters nothing less than a whole new grammar and vocabulary. The very idea of looking back, past the etiolated late Mannerism of his day, past the art of the High Renaissance, to vivid and robust traditions of popular religious sculpture – that too was a profoundly original move. It ran directly counter to the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy of late Renaissance thought, as expressed by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists – namely, the belief that art should continually evolve and progress, and that it was the duty of every artist to increase that forward momentum, whether he did so incrementally or through some great leap of innovation.

There was admittedly room for a degree of retrospection within Vasari’s fundamentally teleological view of history. As he tells the tale of a great rebirth, or Rinascita, in Italian art, Vasari allows that the earliest masters, such as Giotto or the Pisano family, had been obliged to look back to the art of classical antiquity to rekindle the painting and sculpture of their own day. In articulating that belief, he was adapting a commonplace of the poet Petrarch’s thought – the idea that the classical past was a ‘golden age’ that could be recovered and eventually surpassed thanks to the efforts of humanist scholarship – and applying it to the discipline of art history. Because Vasari was the very first art historian, his notion of art as essentially progressive has proved peculiarly persistent. But the idea that an Italian artist born in the sixteenth century might have thought it worthwhile to look back past the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, not to the classical world but to the art of the earlier Renaissance, and even to the popular arts of the Middle Ages – that would have shocked and bewildered Vasari. He would have regarded such a preference, for the old and the popular over the new and sophisticated, absurd and perverse. Yet Caravaggio exhibited and proclaimed just such a preference. It might even be said that he was the first self-conscious primitivist in the entire history of post-classical Western art. The force, imagination and ingenuity with which he asserted his position made his art seem all the more iconoclastic and persuasive – compelling the admiration of subsequent painters as diverse as Rembrandt and Rubens, Ribera and Zurbarán.

How was it that Caravaggio came to formulate his aggressively retrograde strategy? The most plausible solution would seem to lie in the painter’s roots in Borromean Milan. Caravaggio’s reinvention of devotional religious painting along the lines of a direct, theatrical, visceral, popular art would take place not in Milan but in Rome, and it would happen more than a decade after Borromeo’s death. But it would represent, none the less, a strikingly faithful translation, into the field of art, of the imperatives of Carlo Borromeo’s piety. In matters of piety Borromeo was a dramatist, a populist and – for all his innovations in church architecture and furnishing – a primitivist. The religious art that Caravaggio was destined to create could hardly have been more closely aligned to the beliefs and sensibilities of the charismatic Archbishop of Milan.

There are certainly elements of Caravaggio’s religious painting of which Borromeo would not have approved. The full-breasted figure of the Virgin Mary in Caravaggio’s The Madonna of the Palafrenieri would doubtless have offended his sense of decorum. He would have been disturbed altogether by the painter’s intense sensuality, by his feel for the flesh and blood of the human body and by his sensitivity to the suggestions implicit in the least exchange of glances. Yet even here, Borromeo may have exerted a subtle