I was fortunate enough in the 1980’s to make some screen prints with Erté (Roman Tirtoff) at Coriander Studio. He was in his nineties at this time and was one of the most entertaining and charming artists with whom I had the pleasure of working. I once asked him if he had ever made a piece based on the Virtues. “Oh no” he replied, “the sins are always the most interesting”.

I was reminded of this conversation, when in 2017 Chalk and Vermilion commissioned me to produce an edition based on the seven sins. I titled the prints ‘Seven by Seven’ as I used 49 famous paintings as source material and adopted Pope Gregory the Great’s 6^th century selection and order of the seven Capital sins.

I had always thought it might be an interesting idea to use the Cardinal virtues and combine them with the sins to form a diptych. In this case using the 13^th century version of the sins as proposed by St Thomas Aquinas. The full-length portrait paintings of the Cardinal virtues have been borrowed from the seven paintings in the Uffizi, six by Piero del Pollaiuolo and the seventh Fortitude by Sandro Botticelli.

The images of the Virtues and of the Sins run vertically from top to bottom of the print and the horizontal text is is transparent white.