“When we think of Michelangelo now, we think of him as the painter of the Sistine Chapel and the sculptor of huge figures,” says Martin Clayton, the co-curator of the exhibition.

The link between the two artists is that both ask questions about the nature of the soul, while depicting the human body. The piece is on display from this month in a Royal Academy exhibition that puts 12 of Viola’s works alongside 14 drawings by Michelangelo. It was the moment that two sides of his life-the films he made of his family, the films he made for galleries-suddenly came together as “two inseparable halves of one creative enterprise”, he said. He saw a change in her as the breath left her body and made the triptych as a means of understanding what he had seen. In an interview in 2013, he explained that being in the room with her as she died was “profoundly beautiful, profoundly sad, and mysterious beyond belief”. In his telling, the filming of one section of the Nantes Triptych-the recording of the death of his mother in 1991, which he initially made as a private act, was a turning point in his life and art. The intensity and directness of his appeal to the emotions has made him one of the few contemporary artists to be genuinely popular with a wide public. Throughout his career, Viola’s interest has always lain with the numinous, the sense that there is a spiritual other which rises from and yet is part of the everyday. It was a perfect introduction to Viola’s work-and curiously, not so bad a way to discover it. The beginning of life, the journey of being, and life’s end. In between the two states, a body floats in water. On the left, a woman gives birth on the right, a woman is dying.

Originally imagined to hang in a 17th-century chapel in France, the work is made up of three screens. And upstairs, in a darkened room, I sat still for nearly 30 minutes, utterly transfixed by the Nantes Triptych, which the gallery had bought eight years previously. Around me a huge party unspooled, with everyone celebrating the arrival of this vast new temple to art. The opening of Tate Modern in May 2000 was a strange moment to fall under the spell of the work of the video artist Bill Viola, but I remember it distinctly.

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