But the wash of lime blanking out the old world was a thin layer. Scratch away at the surface and the old ways are still visible.

Jonathan Bate, The Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare

No matter how many layers of white paint are applied, the image always finds a way of coming back to haunt the British imagination.

Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art

One of the questions that pushed me to write the sequence Death and the Gallant was: what would Britain (and specifically England) be like if it had remained loyal to the Catholic Church?  The focus behind this question is not political or religious, as such, but cultural: would our view of art be any different if the Reformation, with its inherent mistrust of the image, had not dominated the country’s affairs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

Pre-Reformation…