The Parkus Empire wrote:Renaissance art began focusing on Christ as purely human. For instance, in prior art depicting the creation of Adam, Christ (who was the canonical athropomorphic rendering of God) was shown to be doing it. With the Renaissance, there comes an old guy as God who looks nothing like Christ, which makes a hard distinction between Christ and God. A new aesthetic exalting flesh and sensuality (even in Christ) becomes dominant, as opposed to prior art which stressed abstraction, asceticism and modesty.
That was partially because Renaissance thinkers were influenced by the knowledge of the Arabs via the Crusades. They began focusing on the humanity of Christ (which, by the way, did not contradict the official position of the Roman Catholic Church), but they did not deny his divinity.
Arguably, the most left-of-center scholastic priest of the Middle Ages, William of Ockham, never renounced his faith. For a time, the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated William (mostly for arguing, in contemporary terms, for a unique place for the public sphere), but that excommunication was shortly reversed.