A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical.

Without being as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected.

Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis.

All that aesthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.
Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino.

A new Catholicity, a cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.
It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose.
Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the Gospel.