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These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles. My hand trembles when I offer you this.

Vouchsafe me Thy mercy, O my God, for I was weak! My sin is loathsome; I prostrate myself before Thee, I cry aloud for mercy! Then seeing Christ amid His white million of youths, beautiful singing saints, gold curls and gold aureoles, lifted throats, and form of harp and dulcimer, he fell prone in great bitterness on the misery of earthly life.

What had hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanised and at the same time transported into a higher intellectual region; and though Lionardo discrowned the Apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time in the history of painting created a Christ not unworthy to be worshipped as the praesens Deus.

What is the meaning of the halo with which artists have surrounded the heads of their pictured saints, of the aureoles which wraps them like a luminous cloud? Is it not a recognition of the fact that these holy personages diffuse their personality in the form of a visible emanation, which reminds us of Milton's definition of light: "Bright effluence of bright essence increate"?

These rocks and undulations are intersected by ravines, rivers, inlets of the sea, lakes, and cataracts, reflecting the many tints of the gorgeously coloured sky and the rays of our vividly bright sun, filling our city as it were with aureoles of glory.

The artist sketched the most different heads successively: the heads of angels, of virgins with aureoles, of Roman warriors with their helmets, of fair, rosy children, of old bandits seamed with scars; and the drowned man always, always reappeared; he became, in turn, angel, virgin, warrior, child and bandit.