Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.

Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body.

This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting.
Gazing at Michael Angelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious.

But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Pheidias.

Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.