Willibald Sauerlander

Manet Paints Monet focuses on an auspicious moment in the history of art. In the summer of 1874, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Claude Monet (1840–1926), two outstanding painters of the nascent Impressionist movement, spent their holidays together in Argenteuil on the Seine River. Their growing friendship is expressed in their artwork, culminating in Manet’s marvelous portrait of Monet painting on a boat. The boat was the ideal site for Monet to execute his new plein-air paintings, enabling him to depict nature, water, and the play of light. Similarly, Argenteuil was the perfect place for Manet, the great painter of contemporary life, to observe Parisian society at leisure. His portrait brings all the elements together— Manet’s own eye for the effect of social conventions and boredom on vacationers, and Monet’s eye for nature—but these qualities remain markedly distinct. With this book, esteemed art historian Willibald Sauerländer describes how Manet, in one instant, created a defining image of an entire epoch, capturing the artistic tendencies of the time in a masterpiece that is both graceful and profound.

A Summer in Argenteuil

Manet Paints Monet

The art of Rubens is rooted in an era darkened by the long shadow of devastating wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the wake of this profound schism, the Catholic Church decided to cease using force to propagate the faith. Like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) sought to persuade his spectators to return to the true faith through the beauty of his art. While Rubens is praised for the “baroque passion” in his depictions of cruelty and sensuous abandon, nowhere did he kindle such emotional fire as in his religious subjects. Their color, warmth, and majesty—but also their turmoil and lamentation—were calculated to arouse devout and ethical emotions. This fresh consideration of the images of saints and martyrs Rubens created for the churches of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire offers a masterly demonstration of Rubens’s achievements, liberating their message from the secular misunderstandings of the postreligious age and showing them in their intended light.

Saints and Martyrs

The Catholic Rubens

Willibald Sauerländer

Volumes I and II bring together Professor Sauerländer's papers on Romanesque art, and complement his two previously published volumes in this series on Gothic art. The studies are again grouped around a number of common themes: structures, problems of classification, the geography of Romanesque art, and its development in Italy and the Empire. Early studies have been updated with references to the more recent literature, and there is a comprehensive index. Volume I Contents: Introduction; Forms and Structures. Romanesque Sculpture in its Architectural Context; Façade ou façades romanes; Reliquien, Altäre und Portale; Die gestörte Ordnung oder "le chapiteau historié"; Initialen. Ein Versuch ueber das verworrene Verhältnis von Bild und Schrift im Mittelalter; The Limits of Classification. Die Geographie der Stile; Style or Transition? The Fallacies of Classification discussed in the Light of German Architecture 1190-1260; Sermonizing in Stone. Über die Komposition des Weltgerichts-Tympanons in Autun; Omnes perversi sic sunt in Tartara Mersi. Skulptur als Bildpredikt. Das Weltgerichtstympanon von Sainte-Foy in Conques; Nisi transmutetis mores. Riflessioni sull'ambiguita dell'iconografia romanica; The Diversity of French Examples. Chefs-d'Oeuvre romans des musées de province; Gislebertus von Autun. Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung seines kuenstlerischen Stils; Löwen in Lyon; Eine trauernde Maria des 12. Jahrhunderts aus dem mittleren Rhônetal; Die Fassade der Abteikirche Saint-Gilles du Gard; Sainte-Foy de Conques; Die Skulptur von Saint-Sernin in Toulouse; Zu dem romanischen Krucifix in Moissac.

Willibald Sauerlander

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