In Depth:  Nigel Halliday

ANISH KAPOOR EXHIBITION

Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London

In the film Dead Man Walking, as Matthew Poncelet’s hope of reprieve from his death sentence diminishes, he comes under increasing pressure from Sister Prejean to confess to the crime for which he is being punished. Although the film is based on Sister Prejean’s campaign against the death penalty, it leaves open the interpretation that it is only the certainty of death that finally compels Matthew to confess his guilt.

Walking round the National Gallery’s exhibition of late Caravaggio, I got the same sense of a man under sentence of death, forced to confront his own mortality.

Michelangelo's involvement with Reformation circles in Italy was public knowledge in his own lifetime. But recently scholars have begun to analyse Reformed influences in some of his most famous works, many of them commissioned by the papacy itself.

A movement for reform within the Roman Catholic church had been active in Italy from as early as 1485 when Savonarola began to preach in Florence. Some favoured only moral and administrative reform.