He believed that, in
rejecting pictorial traditions, he could access a more essential form of personal expression — one that was raw and unfiltered, and espoused a Jungian, primal way of being.
As Walter L. Nathan has observed, the art
rejected by these three church fathers was not the «entirely new
pictorial language» of a mature Christian art but the Christian art of their time, which had «borrowed freely» from the late classical pagan
tradition.