the Rome that had been remade by Michelangelo

and the Counter-Reformation popes.

There came a point when the Roman Church

would be a victim of its own success.

All that wealth, all that power, the biggest basilica

with the biggest dome in the world,

and you know that sooner or later, someone's going to come along

and say, "Remember the simplicity of Christ."

"Remember Christ's mission to teach and preach to the poor."

And then there'd be a second great point that the whole

idea of the Christian message is that the compassion of God

lay in giving his own son the form of human flesh and blood.

Now, you put those two things together,

poverty and a physical presence of flesh and blood,

and you know there has to be a new kind of art.

Only problem is, nobody could do that

since the death of Michelangelo,

and then along comes a second Michelangelo.

We shouldn't get carried away, but isn't it striking that the

rule breakers in art were often law breakers?

Like Cellini,

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

was a bisexual murderer with major anger management issues,

foul-mouthed, short fused, in and out of jail.

But if he acted like a devil, he painted like an angel.

And patrons who suddenly wanted startlingly raw

realistic images of ordinary people, many of them poor,

to persuade themselves they were reviving Christ's gospel

to the humble, couldn't get enough of him.

This is the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome

and this just may be my favourite Caravaggio,

the Madonna of Loreto.

Even by the standards of Christian legends,

this one is a bit of a stretch.

To escape destruction in the 13th century,

the House of the Virgin was supposed to have been

airlifted out of the Holy Land,

touching down in the Italian town of Loreto,

where it became a place of pilgrimage.