In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind.
When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests.

Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.
Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance.

On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages--the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors--were justified in their mistrust of plastic art.

The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4].

It is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would sever us.