Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S.Francis and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought.

His achievement was nothing less than this.

The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery--all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms.

Those were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired by alien emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth for the first time in art.

His work was then a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man.