ABSTRACT
Reginald Pole’s influence on the broadsheet is one of the keys to understanding and interpreting it. However, there is an even more crucial influence, or, to be more exact, set of influences, ones to which Pole was inextricably linked in 1555: the recently completed frescoes of The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of St Peter painted between 1542 and 1550 on the walls of the newly built Cappella Paolina, the pope’s private chapel, in the Vatican.1 The influences of these frescoes and the beliefs of their creator Michelangelo Buonarroti expressed in them are found everywhere in the broadsheet.
