But when I look at Holbein’s portrait of More, I don’t think about the historical role More played in attempting to suppress the Protestant Reformation. I don’t even think about his fictional counterparts in Mr. Bolt’s play or Ms. Mantel’s novels.What I think about is an idea that first came to me as I sat in a high school auditorium contemplating a man who could more easily give up his life than his own understanding of himself. As I sat in the dark, I suddenly recognized that the world I was entering would profoundly test my understanding of myself, too. I needed to figure out where I could bend, where I could grow and where I must stand firm on trembling ground.We don’t give robber barons like Henry Clay Frick a pass because they used their wealth to create important collections that live on beyond them, any more than we give Thomas More a pass for persecuting Protestants. But part of living comfortably in a complicated world means recognizing the complexity of human beings — their inscrutability, their ever-changing priorities, above all their capacity for self-contradiction. Much as we might prefer it to be otherwise, it is possible for a person to do unforgivable things and also things that are remarkably beautiful and good. We do human wisdom a great disservice when we expect it to be perfectly embodied in a flawed human being.Perhaps even more important, we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a symphony or any other artifact of creativity made by a restless, curious, questing human mind, a great work of art finds its completion in the restless, curious, questing mind of the person who encounters it. And there is no predicting how that act of transformation, that experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.Great art of every kind allows people to place themselves, safely, into the larger world. It is transformative precisely because it is one way we come to understand our own part in the expansive, miraculous human story. A great work of art reminds us that our own lives, which too often feel small and insignificant, are part of a story that can be full of cruelty and suffering, yes, but that can also be astonishing. Very often it is magnificent.When someone tells me that a book should no longer be read — or a film should no longer be screened or a painting hung or a play performed — because of some problematic history attached to the work or its creator, I think of the girl I was in 1980, discovering a truth I desperately needed to find, in just that moment, from a story that might or might not be true about a human being who might or might not be good. A human being who, I know now, was almost certainly both.