Entering The Raw and the Cooked at the Saatchi Gallery in London, you are faced with a single enormous painting that occupies the whole of the opposite wall. The Punishment of Richard Roose (2026) is a magnificently anachronistic project: a museum-scale picture of a fairly obscure episode of English history.

Stiff, stylised, life-sized figures stand against a plain background in this painting by Harry Jones London, curator of the exhibition.

At its centre, a boiling cauldron emitting a toxic cloud of steam is the imminent destination for the unfortunate figure standing beside it with his head and hands trapped in stocks. There are monks, men-at-arms, heraldic banners, sinister dogs – everything needed to get medieval with this punitive spectacle.

But the punishment of who, and when? In 1532, Richard Roose, a cook convicted of poisoning, became the first person in England to be executed by being boiled alive. He was sentenced under a novel poisoning act passed specifically for his case.

The appalling spectacle of the cooked cook – an irreplaceable human consciousness reduced to mere meat – appears to exemplify what the medievalist Umberto Eco called the “barbaric” medieval in every way. Except that this event........

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