And with quite a lot of it, what's more, one gets the impression that a lot of the creators involved were like Vaughan Williams, who declared himself an unbeliever but found he liked writing the sort of music expected of composers of devotional music.

There is enormous humour in Gossaert's St Luke Painting The Virgin in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna: the Virgin is borne up on a cloud by infant angels; but their expression is agonised because she is so heavy! Lots of humorous touches in Benozzo Gozzoli's Journey of the Magi in Florence, all the way round the walls of a chapel in the Medici Palace without ever actually getting there; and some really kinky element in the same artist's Life Of St Augustine in his Cathedral in San Gimignano, with the Father of the Church in his schooldays being horsed by a bigger boy to be thrashed on the bare buttocks by his schoolmaster.

Lots of such examples. One can't help but suspect a bit of doubt in the truth of it all by the artists concerned!

~M~