Earlier this week I posted about Caravaggio, one of the finest artists of all time and the subject of the first Canon Club podcast. Religion is at t

Wrong Side of History

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2024-10-27 15:00:04

Earlier this week I posted about Caravaggio, one of the finest artists of all time and the subject of the first Canon Club podcast. Religion is at the heart of his work, and a central theme in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of the Italian master is the background of religious violence, and the Catholic response to the twin threats of Protestantism and Islam.

Caravaggio, born Michelangelo Merisi and named after the archangel, came into the world in 1571 just two weeks before the Battle of Lepanto, a great naval clash in which the Catholic League had defeated the Turks, leading to rejoicing across Christendom, even begrudgingly from Protestants. Scotland’s King James VI wrote an epic poem to celebrate the great Catholic victory, ‘though he felt compelled to add a prefatory disclaimer that Don Juan of Austria, hero of the verse, should still be regarded as a “foreign papist bastard”’.

(Similarly, Elizabeth I had praised the Catholics after the Siege of Malta six years earlier, writing that ‘If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom.’)