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" There was another, theological reason for nudes to be painted, which neatly dovetailed with the cult of ancient art. In these decades, from the 1490s to the 1520s, preachers in Rome laid great stress on the doctrine of the incarnation, that is, the fact that Christ was God made man. And this meant that the human body – which, in turn, because of the automatic misogyny of the times, meant the male body – was not the shameful, sinful thing it had been considered to be through much of the Middle Ages, but glorious, beautiful and holy. "
― Martin Gayford , Michelangelo: His Epic Life