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By Root 1492 0

of the Virgin mourning Christ’s death, including Michelangelo’s celebrated marble Pietà in St Peter’s, the mother’s supporting body is much larger than that of her lifeless son. This echo of Christ’s death and lamentation may also have been meant to express the idea that it was through the act of meditating on Christ’s passion that Francis brought the miracle of his own transfiguration upon himself. By thinking about the dead Christ, he achieved the state of electrifying empathy that summoned forth the blessed vision of the seraph.

Francis was a figure from the relatively recent past. His legend was treasured by Catholics, not least because it seemed such a tangible demonstration of the continuing presence of a miracle-working God in the real and actual world. Protestants disapproved of the veneration of saints and their relics, arguing that too much worship had been displaced from its proper focus on God alone. The destruction of shrines and the suppression of pilgrimage in countries of the Protestant north was, in part, an attempt to stem this perceived haemorrhaging of holiness from the divine centre to the apocryphal margin. But in Catholic Italy, it was feared that such theological purism might rob the world altogether of its Christian magic. To abandon the images and relics of the saints, together with the rituals associated with their veneration, might create the sense of a terminally disenchanted present, cut adrift from the sacred past.

Many of the religious initiatives of the Counter-Reformation addressed this nexus of fear, desire and belief. One of the challenges that the Catholic Church set itself in Caravaggio’s time was that of demonstrating that the old and the modern Christian worlds were not distinct and separate eras but formed, instead, a single unbroken continuum. The very fabric of Rome, where so many of the dramas of Christian history had been played out, was itself interrogated for evidence of this. The discovery of the catacombs, burial places of the earliest generations of Roman Christians, led to a boom in the field of what might be called sacred archaeology. The seventeenth-century Bishop of Vaison, Joseph Maria Suarez, examined the mosaics of ancient Rome from a Christian perspective. Antonio Bosio’s study of the city’s buried architectural bones, Roma Sotterranea, was posthumously published in 1632. Another scholar, Antonio Gallonio, spent years studying the instruments and reconstructing the methods of early Christian martyrdom, publishing the results in 1591 as The Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs. Gallonio gave the different chapters of his book gorily circumstantial titles – ‘Of the Wheel, the Pulley and the Press as Instruments of Torture’, or ‘Of Instruments Wherewith the Heathen Were Used to Tear the Flesh of Christ’s Faithful Servants, to wit Iron Claws, Hooks and Currycombs’ – and his text proved immensely popular. The more lavishly illustrated editions bear vivid witness to the author’s underlying ambition, that of making the holy deaths of venerable memory seem as gruesomely fresh as yesterday’s executions.

The past was not to be thought of as the past. The age of miracles and martyrdoms was not another time, dead and buried, the passing of which was to be mourned; it was part of the present. To go on pilgrimage, as Catholics were encouraged to do, was to reaffirm precisely that belief, because to travel to a holy site was to move through time as well as through space – journeying back through the centuries, in mind and spirit, to relive the events of sacred history as if they were taking place in the here and now. Ascanio Donguidi, Augustinian Canon Regular of San Giovanni in Laterano, one of the principal pilgrimage churches of Rome, published a guidebook for prospective pilgrims in 1600. On approaching St Peter’s, he advised,

You will greatly enjoy thinking about your visit to all the Saints whose relics are kept in that Church. Imagine yourself having found the saints present and alive … O with how much great devotion and fervour and joy of heart you would go