Essays on Life 



to St. Mary, which crowns the series. Here 

 there is nothing of more than common artistic 

 interest, unless we except the stone altar men- 

 tioned in Ruppen's chronicle. This is of course 

 classical in style, and is, I should think, very 

 good. 



Once more I must caution the reader against 

 expecting to find highly-finished gems of art 

 in the chapels I have been describing. A 

 wooden figure not more than two feet high 

 clogged with many coats of paint can hardly 

 claim to be taken very seriously, and even 

 those few that were cut by Tabachetti himself 

 were not meant to have attention concentrated 

 on themselves alone. As mere wood-carving 

 the Saas-Fee chapels will not stand comparison, 

 for example, with the triptych of unknown 

 authorship in the Church of St. Anne at Gliss, 

 close to Brieg. But, in the first place, the 

 work at Gliss is worthy of Holbein himself: 

 I know no wood-carving that can so rivet the 

 attention ; moreover it is coloured with water- 

 colour and not oil, so that it is tinted, not 

 painted; and, in the second place, the Gliss 

 triptych belongs to a date (1519) when artists 



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