  Furthermore, following Maimonides (e.g., Guide I.2), many medieval thinkers envisaged beauty as contingent upon consensus and not a matter of the intellectual faculty. In the Renaissance, by contrast, beauty was elevated to an ideal that, inter alia, moved the intellect, by means of desire, to either perfect that which exists below it or to be perfected by that above.  This principle was subsequently shared by philosophers, poets, and visual artists, and, quite frequently, there existed a fluid line separating these professions.