Saints Elizabeth the New Martyr, Grand Duchess of Russia, the Nun Varvara, and those martyred with them (1918)

To encounter first the powerful blue robes in Poussin's "Holy Family With Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist" and then the sometimes thin, sometimes saturated, often unfathomable blues of Matisse, is to get the sense that blue is part of the artistic sensibility of a nation.

These turn up in a drawing by Louise Bourgeois, in two excessively slick paintings by Elizabeth Olbert depicting Saints Elizabeth and Gertrude as obscene kewpie dolls and in a very funny cartoon by Carol Lay showing a female shark pursuing a two-headed merman wearing dark shades.

He appointed ten cardinals and canonized Saints Elisabeth of Hungary, Dominic de Guzmán, Anthony of Padua, and Francis of Assisi, of whom he had been a personal friend and early patron.