"Greek culture did not hold that the world was necessarily wholly beautiful. Its mythology tells of monstrosities and errors [...] On the other hand in the gods artists saw the model of supreme beauty and this perfection was the aim of the statuary that represented the inhabitants of Olympus. Paradoxically, with the advent of the Christian world this relationship - at least some aspects of it - was inverted: from a theologico-metaphysical standpoint the entire universe is beautiful because it is a divine work and thanks to this total beauty even ugliness and evil are in some way redeemed. By way of compensation, Christ, the human expression of divinity who suffered for us, is portrayed in the moment of his greatest humiliation. [...] When art has to deal with the Passion of Christ, we realise what Hegel pointed out in his Aesthetics, 'you cannot use forms of Greek beauty to portray Christ scourged, crowned with thorns, dying on the cross'. This acceptance of the 'ugliness' of Christ was not immediate, however. [...] It is only in the late Middle Ages that the man on the cross begins to be seen as a real man, beaten, bloodied, disfigured by pain [...] But the introduction of ugliness and suffering to the celebration of the divine encouraged other types of ugliness, which were taken to extreme limits for moralistic and devotional purposes: from images of death, hell, the devil, and sin, to those showing the sufferings of the martyrs."
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