The Royal Academy explores the shared themes of two artists separated by 500 years

If you believe the art market, interest in old masters is waning: in 2013 a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog sold for more than a Raphael drawing of a Head of a Young Apostle the year before. It was to buck this trend that in 2017 Christie’s New York had the idea of sexing up Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi by entering it in a contemporary art sale, a wheeze that netted a record £342 million.

What works in salerooms could work in galleries, as the Royal Academy is about to test out with its new exhibition, “Bill Viola/ Michelangelo: Life Death Rebirth” (until 31 March), an event that teams contemporary video installation with old master drawing. It is not the American video artist’s first dialogue with the masters – Viola’s National Gallery exhibition, “The Passions”, in 2003 was inspired by Renaissance sacred art – but it has the advantage of being focused on a theme that cuts across all eras and cultures: the human journey from birth to death, and beyond.

Viola’s first encounter with the Italian Renaissance came in his early twenties when he was working at a cutting-edge video art studio in Florence. What impressed him most at the time, he has said, were “the resonant stone halls of the medieval cathedrals”; because, for his art form, sound has always been as important as vision.