Outer Beauty, Inner Joy: Contemplating the Soul of the Renaissance brings us back 'home' to our roots in Renaissance Italy, a time when concepts fundamental to modern Western culture were born. We honor and revere Renaissance art but have forgotten the philosophy that inspired it. The Renaissance was an explosion of art and beauty in western history. It was also a time when scholars were seeking a common thread among the world's ancient spiritual traditions. Their ideas and writings had an enormous influence on the creations of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raffaello, and on the works of many other artists and philosophers throughout Italy and Europe. Experience, not doctrine, became the foundation in the individual's search for autonomy. It was the beginning of a freer and more ecumenical way of looking at spirituality and at life.

For Renaissance thinkers, the role of the artist and the making of art held an important place in society. Artists could contact unseen forces, bringing the beauty of higher realms into their earthly creations. Through contemplating this beauty, viewers too could touch its divine essence.

In this selection of passages and images from some of the great writers and artists of the Italian Renaissance, Outer Beauty, Inner Joy seeks to express the classic Renaissance ideal of beauty, and reveal an ecumenical wisdom—one that reaches across boundaries of different belief systems.

In the words of Thomas Moore:

"It is time to move on and focus on those things we have neglected, especially art and beauty, the union of humanism and religion, and making a culture in which our best human efforts join with an infinitely potent spiritual vision to create a world in which human beings thrive, not just physically, but in soul and spirit as well."