London (CNN) -- A newly discovered painting by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci has sent shock waves through the art world, prompting speculation that more of his paintings could be as yet undiscovered.
For Gothic horror and the cult of the sublime brought terror for terror's sake, and they in turn bred the theatre of cruelty and the Modernist creed that art's first duty is to shock.
Too often, in fact, they do little more than titillate the cognoscenti by being as deliberately "transgressive" as possible, in the process shocking innocently earnest viewers who fail to realize that transgressive art has no purpose other than to shock.