His idealisation of an ascetic lifestyle and explicit denunciations of consumerism are clearly hard to reconcile with his multimillionaire status.
On this approach, a link might even suggest itself between the faith underpinning the usage of Christian images and the modern idealisation of art.With customary scholarship, Mr Belting invokes vivid examples.
Famous for his rousing defence, as foreign minister, of France's objections to the war in Iraq, Mr de Villepin was known for his romanticism and impulsiveness, his poetry and his history books, his admiration for Napoleon and his idealisation of the state.
The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the 20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology, which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation.
The idealisation of bohemian artistic and intellectual life, and the dogma of its superiority over the bourgeois commercial life, that prevailed among Keynes' Bloomsbury friends, and prevails still among artists and intellectuals, is a remarkably sturdy remnant of our feudal legacy.
As his biographer Jose Harris records, he was unconvinced by talk of a British work ethic, declaring the idealisation of "useful toil" a trick of the upper classes to promote industry among the lower classes.
Britons still munch on the eponymous biscuits created after Garibaldi's triumphal tour of the country in 1864, when he intoxicated workers, shopkeepers, clergymen, lords and ladies alike.Sociology was not yet a discipline, but before the century was out, mass idealisation of this sort would lend itself to the scientific study of charisma and group psychology.
But there is something else at work here, something that has drawn self-described geeks and nerds to comic books for nearly a century, and that is an idealisation of the aggressive hyper-masculine superhero archetype.
In depictions of the Crucifixion, there is always the need to find an appropriately expressive spot somewhere between alienating idealisation at one extreme and a near-pornography of suffering at the other.
They hated academic painting as defined by what was approved of at the Royal Academy – all that murkily toned, chiaroscuro-dominated, old-masterish mimicry, with its dependence upon classical mythology for so many of its themes, and its inclination towards the muscular idealisation of the human body.
Separate seating can reflect an idealisation of a Saudi-style system where men and women hardly interact outside of a familial setting.
