truth to nature; they were afflicted with a
bodily frailty and mental infirmity wholly unequal to the tragic
situation. These shortcomings in works of noblest motive may be ascribed
to two causes: first, advancing age, with increasing loss of power;
secondly, the confirmed habit of slighting art and ignoring nature in
order to magnify some favourite dogma. Thus the divine painter in late
years missed his aim and marred his work.

These reflections receive confirmation in _The Seven_ _Sacraments_,
compositions which are triumphs of faith at the expense of art. The
painter, however, in fairness, must be allowed to speak for himself. "I
must," he writes, "first set forth what my conception of art is. Art to
me is as the harp of David, whereupon I would desire that Psalms should
at all times be sounded to the praise of the Lord. For when earth and
sea and everything that therein is, when Heaven and all the powers of
Heaven unite in extolling their Creator, how can man fail to join with
every faculty and gift his Maker has endowed him with in this universal
hymn of thanksgiving? And especially how can one of the noblest
attributes he possesses--the creative talent revealed in art--fail to
acknowledge that its highest glory and noblest end consist in offering
in art's own peculiar language Psalms and Songs of Praise to the Lord?
So precisely as Psalms of Praise would I wish to be accepted my seven
representations of the Sacraments, which, as so many fountains of grace,
the Church causes abundantly and ceaselessly to flow. These mercies of
God are the subjects of my seven pictures. As regards their style and
execution, they may be compared to tapestries after the manner of the
Arazzi of Raphael, such as it is customary to display in Italy on feast
days for the adornment of churches, and serving for the instruction of
the people in a language all can understand. Similar tapestries might,
in a more favourable time than the present, have been wrought from these
representations, but they appear now only as designs preparatory to
their possible completion some day in fresco or tempera."[6]

Biblical history received ample exposition in numerous accessory
compositions. Each of _The Seven Sacraments_ was surrounded by a
predella, a frieze, and two side borders. Some of these long spaces
dilated into several themes, and thus the total number of subsidiary
subjects falls little short of forty. The foliated and floral ornament
in style