The director of the Wallace Collection on how he hopes to reconnect great art with religious experience

One of the reasons traditionally given for the Church’s antipathy to “mixed marriages” was the potential confusion caused to children by having parents of different faiths. For art historian Xavier Bray, though, having a Catholic mother and an Anglican father has broadened his horizons rather than clouded them.

“I’m one of these people who can never quite do this theory of conversion, full body and soul, if that is what it is meant to be,” he says. “I pick out the best aspects of Catholicism and Anglicanism.”

Bray first made a name for himself in 2009 with the landmark “The Sacred Made Real” exhibition at the National Gallery of seventeenth-century Spanish devotional art – he had to overcome scepticism from his bosses that the public would turn up for something so “Catholic”, but in the end 100,000 people queued round the block to catch a glimpse. It was a “surprise hit” that earned him a reputation in the art world as a risk-taker and innovator, confirmed during his subsequent five-year tenure from 2011 as Chief Curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London, where he even created a church within its Regency premises in order to stage a 2013 exhibition of paintings by Murillo to best advantage.