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influence on the painter. Caravaggio paints with a strong and unmistakable sense of the perils and the powers of looking. His pictures both embody and evoke an acute and piercing gaze. Caravaggio sees what he sees with such intensity – even if it is only an image in his mind’s eye, an image conjured from the imagination – that he makes seeing itself seem a compulsive and potentially fraught act. It is as if he feels at every moment that to see is also to possess and, potentially, to be possessed. This is why Caravaggio’s paintings have a destructive effect on pictures by other artists hung anywhere near them in art galleries. They exert such a sensually charged, magnetic attraction that they seem almost as though backlit, or somehow illuminated from within, while the pictures around them – even those of great artists, whether Rembrandt or Poussin or Velàzquez – appear by comparison to recede, to retreat from the gaze.

Pablo Picasso was another artist whose pictures project such deep intensity of looking that they have an obliterating effect on other works of art. In his case, the phenomenon seems to have been linked to a powerfully distinctive way of seeing learned from the culture in which he grew up – the male-dominated and intensely Catholic society of late nineteenth-century Andalusia, where they even had a phrase for this kind of looking, the mirada fuerte (which literally means ‘strong gazing’). It has been succinctly characterized by the historian David Gilmore: ‘When the Andalusian fixes a thing with a stare, he grasps it. His eyes are fingers holding and probing … the sexual element is present also … The light of the eyes is highly erotic … In a culture where the sexes are segregated to the point of mutual invisibility, the eye becomes the erogenous zone par excellence …’33 The explanation for Caravaggio’s own intensity of looking may also lie in the distinctive milieu of his youth, the milieu of Borromean Milan – a place where, just as in Picasso’s Andalusia, rigorous attempts were made to keep men and women apart.

If the dangers inherent in the sense of touch disturbed Borromeo, he was yet more disturbed by the opportunities for corruption furnished by the sense of sight. In the words of the Methodus Confessionis – the sixteenth-century confessor’s manual that Borromeo himself recommended to his Milanese clergy – sight was described as the most dangerous of all the senses precisely because it was superior to the rest and had the ability to ‘incite man to many sins’.34 In a sermon delivered in the Lombard town of Lecco on 2 July 1583, Borromeo went even further. Reflecting on the murky biblical tale of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), he argued that the origins of all such sexual crimes lay within the sense of sight. Dinah was at fault for the rape, he decreed, because she had allowed herself to be seen and had underestimated what can happen when men are given sight of the flesh that they sinfully covet. The eyes, he pronounced, ‘are like two gates to the castle of our body. So when they are in the Devil’s control, he is also the master of our heart, and can introduce into our soul whatever he wants … consequently, since the eyes can introduce great mischief into the soul, they are to be guarded with the utmost diligence. For “death has come up through our windows” [Jeremiah 9:21]: therefore we have to keep them shut.’35

It was remarkable advice to give to any congregation. To avoid sin, close your eyes. Take Borromeo’s views one step further and the logical thing to do would be to inflict blindness systematically on the whole Christian community to keep it pure of lust and other evil thoughts. He was also of course perfectly capable of taking exactly the opposite line, especially when it came to images of the kind to be encountered on the sacred mountain at Varallo. There, Carlo Borromeo would counsel the faithful to open their eyes as wide as possible – as he did, in the days before his death – and drink in the spectacle of Christ’s suffering. For all his contradictions, one thing is certain. At the centre