Photo: Gérard Blot Just as it had in the Middle Ages, the Christian faith dominated art throughout the Renaissance.
Greatly as it is to be welcomed in the interest of the public health, that ever wider circles, especially of the metropolitan population, are striving to make the healing power of sun and air and water serviceable to their body, as greatly must the so-called nudity movement be disapproved of as a cultural error.
This section opens with works from centers of humanism that strongly impacted the emergence of the nude in the 1400s—Florence, Mantua, and Paris— while also exploring how humanism shaped art more fully across the Continent.