In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting’s capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality.

中文翻译：

---

崇高的神性：文艺复兴时期宗教艺术中的情欲情感


在天主教宗教改革的背景下，人们对宗教艺术中自然主义描绘美丽、感性人物的情感效力表示严重关切。在神学话语中，类似的焦虑早已被阐述为对异常美丽的神性的崇高合法欲望与卑鄙非法情感之间潜在的联系。在十五世纪末和十六世纪初，在特伦特会议之前的几十年里，少数作家、思想家和艺术家断言灵性和性之间存在积极的联系。列奥纳多·达·芬奇和一群在他的支持下在伦巴第工作的画家敏锐地意识到绘画唤起观众情感的能力。他们为家庭奉献而制作的照片以明显性感和异常的史诗般的美女为特色。本文表明，这种图像大胆地宣扬了愉悦感觉对宗教的价值。它的流行让我们可以想象，观看者既没有陷入罪恶之中，也没有寻求脱离物质领域，而是重新参与古老的身体与灵魂、性与灵性的辩证关系。