Anne Dillon made her name with a study of English Catholic martyr texts produced during the sixteenth century. This was a genuinely new approach and was particularly timely because the Catholic side of the tracks for this historiography was the poorest of the poor. Very deftly Dillon wove together the issues raised by martyrdom for contemporary Catholics. She took the relevant texts and depictions concerning those who were regarded as part of a martyr tradition seriously on their own terms rather than just reading them as cultural objects; but she also thought about what one might call a politics of martyrdom, a way of understanding why the things that happened to certain people were narrated in a particular way. This generated perhaps the only serious debate in the modern scholarly literature about the place of martyrology in the post-Reformation Catholic community. Not that this was entirely to the liking of some modern commentators, who apparently thought that this material really should not be up for discussion at all, despite the fact that at the time that this material was narrated and produced that was precisely what it was, a deeply polemical account of the relationship between the post-Reformation state and those who could not fully comply with its demands for conformity.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dillon's earlier work was her analysis of the well-known martyr depictions in the 1580s, the ones that graced the walls of the English seminary in Rome and that appeared subsequently as engravings. Now Dillon has looked at the production of a broadsheet in the mid-1550s, which depicts the gruesome end of the Carthusian martyrs of the mid-1530s, hanged, drawn, and quartered for their refusal to comply with the Crown's demands for public subscription to the declaration of king's supremacy over the Church. This is a work of art history but also a highly erudite visual detective enterprise, with chapters on everything from the mechanics of producing engravings to the contemporary practice of anatomical dissection. The claim, based on a quite astonishing range of very well-reproduced images, is that Michelangelo's artistic ideas (especially as they are found in his frescoes in the Cappella Paolina) are everywhere in the broadsheet, a broadsheet in the production of which his friend Cardinal Reginald Pole was heavily involved. Dillon thinks that Pole may have written the text for the broadsheet. The claim is also that Michelangelo was heavily influenced by the, as it were, Left-leaning opinions of the so-called spirituali and that these in a quasi-Nicodemist fashion are incorporated in the broadsheet. (Dillon concludes that Gaspar Becerra was the artist who designed the broadsheet.) The interdisciplinary approach adopted here is used to show that the broadsheet evolved visually as much from the world of the execution of justice (and also the dissection rooms) in mid-sixteenth-century Rome as from the events of the English Reformation of the 1530s.

Some of this material is, admittedly, the outcome of informed deduction. As the author says, many of the sketches necessary for absolute certainty about the copying of images have not survived. The main conclusions, however, are clear enough: the broadsheet came from the Spanish community in Rome. It was commissioned by Cardinal Alvarez for the Spanish king Philip II. While it may have been intended for the twentieth anniversary of the execution of the English Carthusians, it was also part of the processes for spinning the reunion of England and Rome, and was designed to justify the imminent crackdown on heresy in England; it was a reminder of the evil that heretics could do and why they could not be tolerated.

One lingering question, of course, is how far informed viewers would have made the connection between the broadsheet's condemnation of Lutheran heresy and the incorporation of the images created by Michelangelo, the secret sympathizer with a strain of contemporary Christianity that had been marginalized and anathematized by the Council of Trent. It seems that Dillon leaves this question open, though it does raise the issue of how far some self-fashioning liberals can turn into exactly the same kind of intolerant fascists with whom they are technically out of sympathy.

It is worth saying that while, for the uninitiated, art history can often be perplexing (and I would myself admit, for example, to not having grasped the finer points of certain books on Holbein's famous ambassadors portrait), this to my mind is very clear. The argument never gets lost in the detail of the visual imagery, even though some of the analysis, for instance, in the chapter on watermarks, is extremely intricate. Even in the context of the stark violence of the political battles of the Reformation, which often seem almost banal in their brutality, some of those who constructed the martyrological tradition around such events were incredibly sophisticated in what they did. It is, however, ironic that something which, on the surface, is an invocation of Catholic piety, rectitude, heroism, and valor (and is actually that) is also derived from a distinctly murky, weird, and (to a modern mind) perhaps unappealing combination of theologically unsound and dissenting ideas, dissection theaters, and the brutality of everyday life. It is a reminder to us that the images which, we think, tell us simply enough about the past, a past that we believe we understand and with which we can even associate ourselves, sometimes really do nothing of the kind.