It's hard to dispute the claim of many Italians that in banning the crucifix from their schools the European court of human rights is assaulting Italian identity. This is a multifarious, rapidly transforming world, and Italy needs to embrace multiculturalism as much as any other nation. However, nobody who has ever looked at any Italian art can seriously question the depth, richness, and popularity of this culture's relationship with the cross.
One of my favourite paintings in London's National Gallery is the Mond Crucifixion, painted by the young Raphael. I love its silver moon and gold sun with their magical faces in the blue sky. But at the centre of the tall painting is the figure of Christ on a wooden cross in the Italian countryside. Again and again, in some of the most beautiful images in the world, Italian artists and their audience have imagined the cross being brought home like this.
I hope human rights inspectors don't visit the monk's cells at San Marco in Florence, where in the 15th-century Fra Angelico and his assistants painted one fresco after another of Christ on the cross, stark and isolated, to provoke contemplation of the Passion. In the same monastery, you can see relics of Savonarola, the fierce prophet who encouraged his followers to meditate on that mystery.
One of Savonarola's enthusiasts was Michelangelo, whose youthful carving of a crucifix has become an object of some dispute. But Michelangelo was working in an already ancient tradition. The floods in Florence in 1966 severely damaged one of the oldest and greatest images of the cross in Italian art, by Cimabue in Santa Croce. The famous cross by the great 15th-century architect Brunelleschi in the same city's Santa Maria Novella has been more fortunate.
Whatever you think of Catholicism, it has generated some beautiful art. In Italy, that art is so deeply woven into a living culture that to bland it out is to wage war on human rights. I think this is an ugly attack on a cultural fabric rightly admired all over the world.
