Padua’s version of the Sistine Chapel, the Scrovegni Chapel, houses one of Italy’s great Gothic/Proto-Renaissance masterpieces: a cycle of Giotto frescoes. This specific fresco shows Jesus before Caiaphas. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche said:
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The fact that the stronger races of northern Europe failed to reject the Christian God does not say very much for their skill in religion, not to mention their taste. They really should have been able to cope with this sort of diseased and decrepit monster of decadence. But they were damned for their failure: they brought sickness, age, and contradiction into all of their instincts, – they have not created any more gods since then.
Almost two thousand years and not one new god! And all the while, this pathetic God of Christian monotono-theism (*) instead, acting as if it had any right to exist, like an ultimatum and maximum of god creating energy, of the human creator spiritus!, this hybrid creature of ruin, made from nullity, concept, and contradiction, who sanctions all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and exhaustions of the soul! – –
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(*) The verbal mockery of monotonous-theism had already been used by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols.