Emile Mâle:
To recount the agony of a God, to show a God exhausted, bruised and covered with bloody sweat, was an enterprise to give the Greeks of the fifth century pause. Their heroic conception of life made them unsympathetic to suffering. For them, suffering was servile because it destroyed the equilibrium between body and soul; such an imbalance ought not the be eternalized in art. Only beauty, strength and serenity should be set forth for man's contemplation. In this way, art became salutary and presented a model of perfection toward which the city might strive. Its assembly of marble gods and heroes said to the young men: Be strong, and like us, master life. This is the lesson everlastingly to be learned from antiquity. A great lesson, assuredly, and one that has affected men's souls ever since the Renaissance. Michelangelo, however much a Christian, was under the spell of classical heroism. His Christ at Santa Maria sopra Minerva is as beautiful as an athlete and carries his cross like a conqueror; no trace of suffering shows on his impassive face. Like a Greek, Michelangelo despised suffering and taught others to have contempt for it... For the drama in the history of Renaissance art, in France and in the whole of Europe, arises from the struggle between two principles, two conceptions of life.[Religious Art in France: the Late Middle Ages by Emile Mâle, translated by Marthiel Matthews. Princeton University Press, 1986]
What, then, were our old Gothic masters trying to say? They wished to say that suffering exists and that it is useless to deny what we see woven into the web of life. They were fundamentally right. A religion and an art in which suffering has no place does not express the whole of human nature.