Thus the 21st-century viewers of European Old Master religious art, even the Christians among us, are all "visitors to this Christian world," as John Drury warns us in his introduction.

He changed the course of art by proving that spirit and flesh, holiness and reality, could be pictured together as one image. Sadly enough, many of Giotto’s paintings have been lost or mutilated.

Art comes out of the church anyway, and even though modern art reacted against that, it still took up that holiness. It's about the temple and seriousness, which with curators and critics is like ...