Imagine you are an artist of great talent living under the Holy Roman Empire. Remunerative work is available to you if you are willing to take projects that the Church commissions. Your aesthetic or formal liberty (what some might refer to as duende, or ‘poetic license’) is constrained in most instances only by the site-specific measurements and the tenets of Christian theology, which are broader and deeper and richer than most people suppose. The artwork you produce will almost certainly be better if you are convicted of the truth to which your subject matter pertains. However, no one but you knows whether, or to what degree, you are convicted of it; whether you see the whole enterprise as an expression of truth, or as a ‘fairy tale,’ a fraudulence, or some other kind of error. Because no one but you is privy to the workings of your conscience.