But what about today? Is there a discernible legacy in contemporary art of such incitement to fear as one finds in Giotto or Bosch, or of the perennial ambition – from Michelangelo to Munch – to forge the quintessential face of fear? Damien Hirst’s notorious diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007), springs to mind as a notable modern reinvention of the memento mori tradition in art history, which customarily features skulls and skeletons not so much intended to make you merely ‘remember you must die’ (the meaning of the Latin phrase) but scare you witless by death’s imminence. Hirst’s grimacing curio, comprised of more than 8,600 flawless diamonds, does not so much excite fear, however, as bemusement and exasperation at the outlandish cost of constructing such a gaudy gewgaw, let alone purchasing it. The asking price was £50 million. For the love of God, indeed.

So concerned with ceaselessly skirmishing over whether what they do is or isn’t art, many recent artists, one begins to sense, have simply lost touch with the full palette of emotions with which art is capable of being inflected, with the pigment of fear having arguably dried up the most. While it’s true that Hirst’s peers, the British brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, routinely flirt with fear as a potential aesthetic element in a body of work that embraces creepy haunted-house mannequins to childish defacements of appropriated images from Francisco Goya’s chilling The Disasters of War series, their meta mockeries of the macabre are, perhaps unintentionally, less scary than silly.