All Artists and All Saints

Fra Angelico, The Virgin Mary with the Apostles and Other Saints, National Gallery of London, (NG 663.2), early 1420s. Poplar, 34 × 66 cm.

“The moment the artist works well—the moment the Geometer demonstrates—‘it makes little difference whether he be in a good temper or in a rage.’ If he is angry or jealous, his sin is the sin of a man, not the sin of an artist.* Art in no wise tends to make the artist good in his specifically human conduct … human art does not produce works which proceed to action of their own motion; God alone makes works of that kind, and so the Saints are truly and literally His masterpiece.” (Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J.F. Scanlan, Cluny Media 2016, 15-16)

*i.e., he sins insofar as he is a man, not insofar as he is an artist (my clarification)