Some time between 1445 and 1450 the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden (b. 1400, Tournai, d. 1464, Brussels) painted three oak panels which have come to be known as the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece. The artist had made a pilgrimage to Rome in the Jubilee year of 1450, and his subsequent work – including this panel – displays a new-found vibrancy and colour. The trip to Rome may have also inspired a state of mind which is evident in the work: for Rogier offers a summa, a visual summary, of the Christian life as a sacramental journey from cradle to grave. This was a vision conceptualised and promoted by popes since the twelfth century, one which had become, by van der Weyden’s time, the elementary framework for Christian lives.

The history of the sacraments begins, of course, much earlier. Already the second-century Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225) attempted to use the Roman legal term sacramentum – oath – to describe religious commitment. He also developed sacramentum to mean ‘symbol, figure, allegory, symbolic virtue or power, a symbolic order or person’. Sacraments were those gestures or practices which denoted a commitment, or signified events of great importance. The next important stage in the discussion was, as is so often the case, the treatment offered by Augustine of Hippo (354–430). As part of his thoroughgoing conceptualization of a Christian society and polity, of the processes which he witnessed all around him in the regions of the Roman Empire, he explored the nature of sacraments.