The presence of so many scenes of death in the paintings of the past was the result of accident. For a long while after the dawn of the Renaissance, those controlling churches and other religious institutions of the Christians were the chief and almost the only patrons of art, and they required paintings as well for didactic purposes as for decoration. For some time pictures often took the place of writing, where comparatively few could read, in the inculcation of Christian doctrines and history, and they were largely used as images before which people could kneel in prayer. The most important facts bearing upon Christian faith are concerned with death, and so there have been accumulated thousands of paintings of scenes of the Crucifixion, the death-beds of saints, instances of martyrdom, and so on. While these paintings have been highly useful as tending to invite reverence for a sublime creed, it would be injurious to suggest that generally they take a high place in art. Some of them do, but the very large number of them which indicate dying agony, or recent death with all its mortal changes, must not be approved from a strict art point of view, for any beauty which may be present apart from the subject is instantly neutralized by the pain and horror arising from the invention. But it is evidently unnecessary to produce such pictures, even in the case of the Crucifixion, for there are ample works in existence to show that the face and body of Christ can be so presented as to be free from indications of physical suffering or decay. But if we are to protest against designs exhibiting forbidding aspects of death in sacred works, what can we say of the pictures of executions, massacres, plagues, and so on, which ever and again have been produced since the middle of the nineteenth century? Deeds of heroism or self-sacrifice on the battlefield where bodies of the fallen may be outlined are well, but simple wholesale murders as presented by Benjamin-Constant, Heim, and fifty others, where the motive does not pretend to be anything else than massacre or other ghastly event, can only live as examples of degraded art. There may be something said for Verestchagin, who painted heaps of heads and skulls, and scattered corpses, in order to show the evils of war, but if the arts are to be used at all for such a purpose, the poet or orator would be much more impressive because he could veil the hideous side of the subject with pathos and imagery, and further differentiate between just and unjust wars. The painter is powerless to do these things. He can only represent the horrors of war by depicting horrible things which is entirely beyond the province of his art. The purpose of art is to give pleasure, and if the design descend below the line where displeasure begins, then the art is no more.