"The genius of Rome".

Four hundred years ago, Pope Clement VIII presided over the Jubilee of 1600. The preceding century had been witness to a traumatic event--the Reformation--the effects of which Clement sought to counteract with what later became known as the Counter-Reformation. But rather than using soldiers, the secularist's tool of choice, to achieve his goal, he used something more powerful: art.

This meant plenty of work for young artists such as 21-year-old Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the legion of extraordinary young artists who followed in his painterly footsteps.

The results of the Pope's vision were extraordinary. Mouldering churches were restored to their former splendour, painting was given a new lease on life and Rome once again became the centre of the art world. And by 1600, Caravaggio, the new kid in town, had changed the course of Western art forever.

This is the point of The Genius of Rome, the ravishing new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art here in London which explores the origins of the Baroque style in the Eternal City between 1592 and 1623 during the reigns of Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605), Pope Paul V (1605-1621) and Pope Gregory XV (1621-1623).

With 140 paintings by 50 artists, the exhibition moves seamlessly from the secular to the divine, beginning with some of the earliest pure landscape paintings ever seen, and moving on to scenes of the Roman demimonde.

Yet beautiful as they are, these works are soon eclipsed by a host of religious canvases painted by a pantheon of greats. These are the showstoppers, almost too dizzying to absorb. Caravaggio's The Stigmatisation of St. Francis (1594) and St. John the Baptist (1604); Saraceni's Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1606); Gentileschi's David Contemplating the Head of Goliath (1610); Rubens' Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1608); and Cigoli's Ecce Homo (1607), the portrait of a scourged Christ so human, so hurt, and so exhausted I could have wept.

Absolutely wonderful.

Fast forward four centuries to London's Tate Modern, that Orwellian repository of modern and postmodern art that opened during Jubilee 2000, and see what's happened since, particularly during the last century, the most secular--and the ugliest--in history.

The parade of 20th century art inside Tate Modern confirms the deterioration. From Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, and Pablo Picasso through to Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Piet Mondrian, you can actually watch man separate himself from God by degrees: the colours fade and the canvases become blurrier and blurrier until the hard shapes and bloody splatters of the merciless material world take over.

Ultimately, man's alienation from God becomes complete. He becomes incoherent, lost, and deformed; and his art proclaims his sense of meaninglessness. By the 1990s, the only 'art' his chronicler, the artist, can manage is to glue chunks of elephant dung around a distorted portrait of a 'madonna' and call it art (which it is, as art is merely the record of man's soul in history). What's more, offerings such as Chris Offili's Madonna win international prizes.

How can this be?

The 20th century was the most violent in history. The 20th century was also the first century in which most countries rejected religion, either informally or formally. There is a direct connection between those two facts.

St. John Chrysostom says: "Nothing is more unbecoming than sin." Yet, in the matter of morals, sin, appalling and unsightly sin so prevalent in the world, we do not tend to notice the depth of the insane disarray because it is everywhere. Nor does the world recognise the ridiculousness and ignominiousness of such disordered behaviour precisely because of its great prevalence. But the artist records it nonetheless, in all its permutations.

Sin is not only ugly, it is blinding. It interferes with beauty and with man's ability to create it.

Without God, man is unhappy. He drinks, he takes drugs, he tries anything and everything to blunt the pain. He even tries to invent utopias and alternate realities, all of which are necessarily hideous as he is no longer connected to the one and only source of beauty and happiness.

Naturally, his art, the mirror of his soul, reflects this interior reality.

I have studied art all my life and I continue to love it in all its magnificent and miserable forms.

What I hadn't expected was to be as uplifted as I was recently by being reminded of the splendid (and massive) contribution of the Catholic Church to art. One look at any or all of those paintings and one is at once humbled and overjoyed.

Surely, this is how God Himself intended art to be.

Paula Adamick is our London, England columnist. Her column appears every other issue.