FIGURE K Anton Raphael Mengs (German, 1728- 1779). Saint Pascal Baylon's Vision of the Eucharist, 1776. Oil on panel. Aranjuez, Spain, Church of San Pascual Baylon. Photo: Madrid, Patrimonio Nacional. posed to Mengs's restrained approach to ecclesiastical painting, which Charles III enthusiastically embraced. The king owned numerous easel pic- tures on religious themes by Mengs, and he considered the grave, more sculptural Roman language of these images to be the appropriate mode for 9 religious painting. The work of Mengs consciously drew on the canon of Western art, providing a sense of universality and investing these sober images with the authority of Rome that was so important to Charles III. In the end, the very inventiveness, individual feeling, and otherworldliness of Tiepolo's paintings may have led the king to reject them. Their Venetian religious sen- sibility, suffused with sentiment and mysticism, was at odds with a commis- sion designed to express the king's orthodoxy. 62