was empiric.  Leonardo’s subtle skill was based upon dissection.  Michael Angelo likewise studied from the human corpse, distasteful as he found the process.  Donatello had no such scientific training:  he had no help from the surgeon or the hospital, hence mistakes; his doubt, for instance, about the connection between ribs and pectoral bones was never resolved.  But, notwithstanding this lack of technical data, the Bronze David has a distinction which is absent in statues made by far more learned men.  Donatello’s intuition supplied what one would not willingly exchange for the most exact science of the specialist.  The David was an innovation, but the phrase must be guarded.  It was only an innovation so far as it was a free-standing study from the nude.  Nothing is more misleading than the commonplace that Christianity was opposed to the representation of the nude in its proper place.  The early Church, no doubt, underwent a prolonged reaction against all that it might be assumed to connote; one might collect many quotations from patristic literature to this effect.  But the very articles of the Christian Creed militated against the ultimate scorn of the human body:  the doctrine of the Resurrection alone was enough to give it more sanctity than could be derived from all the polytheism of antiquity.  The Baptism of Christ, the descent into Limbo, and the Crucifixion itself, were scenes from which the use of drapery had to be less or more discarded.  The porches and frontals of Gothic churches abounded in nude statuary, from scenes in the Garden of Eden down to the Last Judgment.  Abuses crept in, of course, and the Faith protested against them.  The advancing standard of comfort and, no doubt, a steadily deteriorating climate, diminished the everyday familiarity with undraped limbs.  Clothes became numerous and more normal; the artist came to be regarded as the purveyor of what had ceased to be of natural occurrence.  He was encouraged by the connoisseur, lay and cleric, who found his literature in antiquity, and then demanded classical forms in his art.  The nude was arbitrarily employed:  there was no biblical authority for a naked David, and Donatello was therefore among the first to err in this respect.  The taste for this kind of thing sprang from humanism, and throve with hellenism, till a counter-reaction came suddenly in the sixteenth century.  Michael Angelo was hotly attacked for his excessive study from the nude as prejudicial to morals.[139] Ammanati wrote an abject apology to the Accademia del Disegno for the very frank nudity of his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed.  What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—­very negation of propriety.  Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous.  From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection.  The Palaestra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the religions of the country, with its favourable atmosphere, climate, and stone, all combined to make the nude a normal aspect of human life.  But it was not the sole inspiration of their art:  in Sparta, where there was most nude there was least art; in Italy, when there was worst art there was most nude.