once pristine

Kenneth Clark: the poignant incongruence between the high gothic and rennaissance extravagance in art and the greatness of the austerity in spritualism that such art glorifies; a salient example being the 'great basilica' built in honor of Saint Francis, which was 'decorated by all the chief Italian painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Cimabue onwards', this for the one who personified poverty : (Clark, like Panofsky, brings up Chartres Cathedral to illustrate his point) : the glorification (and deification) of the virgin: 'austere', 'modest', 'chaste', she is nonetheless depicted in art as the object of human, earthly love : the origins of 'ideal or courtly love' : the conventional conclusion that this phenomenon was imported from Persia during the crusades along with the pointed arch of the gothic: '... I suppose one must admit that the cult of the Virgin had something to do with it. In this context it sounds rather blasphemous, but the fact remains that one often hardly knows if a medieval love lyric is addressed to the poet's mistress or to the Virgin Mary. The greatest of all writings about ideal love, Dante's Vita Nuova, is a quasi religious work, and in the end it is Beatrice who introduces Dante to Paradise.'