One may wonder about the absence of the Renaissance from the three traditions outlined by Pope Benedict XVI. What is one to make of the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer and Bernini, to name just a few?
An answer might be found in Pope St John Paul II's 1999 Easter address to artist.* In a passage describing the history of Western Art, he makes reference to two related but diverging philosophies motivating the art of this time, Christian Humanism and secular Humanism. In a renewed engagement with Europe's Greco-Roman heritage, both find significant importance in the human experience of the world. The former, grounded in the mystery of the Incarnation, continues the project of examining human life and the world under the aegis of a Biblical cosmology**. The later, equating such cosmology to the same bin as other antique mythologies, finds man as the measure of all things.
This is a subtle distinction; a choice between a theocentric and anthropocentric viewpoint. In the ensuing centuries, this rift became more pronounced as the balanced relationship of Natural Reason and Divine Revelation is rejected in view of an increasingly Materialist cosmology and Rationalist epistemology. It is not a question of the data gathered but probity of it's interpretation. Sapientis est ordinare.
This dichotomy is potentially the rationale for Pope Benedict's hesitancy of asserting the Renaissance's a unqualified place in the traditions of Sacred Art. The same religious subject may on the one hand be treated reverently, in full service to the Church, the other, in a superficial way, as merely the fitting decoration for the job at hand. The technical and Humanistic appetites growing in the Middle Ages and full flowering in the Baroque, ought be garnered from the Renaissance but the artist must be prudent in the acceptance of Renaissance forms which are divergent from Divine Revelation. For as Aristotle remarks in the Politics, the forms of music are not inert vessels but of their nature, are invested with certain ethoi.***
*Pope St John Paul II, Letter to Artists, S. 10.
**Pope Benedict, XVI, Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections (Regensburg Address), On the "baptizing" of Greek culture.
*** Aristotle, Politics, viii. "On the other hand, even in mere melodies there is an imitation of character, for the musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. "