Slice

Johann Adalbert Angermayer
Still Life with Carp Head
ca. 1725
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

Michael Peter Ancher
Conversation
ca. 1905
oil on canvas
(sketch)
Skagens Museum, Denmark

Jan van Amstel
The Road to Emmaus
ca. 1540
oil on panel
Milwaukee Art Museum

Jost Amman
Portrait of Gaspard de Coligny, Seigneur de Châtillon
1573
hand-colored etching
(at bottom, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which Coligny died)
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Friedrich von Amerling
Princess Marie Franziska von Liechtenstein
1838
oil on board
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Wilhelm Altheim
Self Portrait
ca. 1900
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Franz Alt
National Theater in Rome
1887
watercolor on paper
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Albrecht Altdorfer
The Crucifixion
1518
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Alessandro Algardi
Decorative Surround for Arms of the Pamphili
before 1654
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Heinrich Aldegrever
Hercules and the Nemean Lion
1550
drawing
(print study)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Kristoffer Albrecht
Untitled
1986
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Pietro Francesco Alberti
Interior of Art Academy
ca. 1610
engraving
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Willem van Aelst
Vase of Flowers
ca. 1658-60
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Nicolas van Aelst
New St Peter's, Rome, in Jubilee Year
1600
engraving
(book illustration)
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Nicolò dell'Abate
Two Studies of a Young Man of Fashion
before 1571
drawing
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Hans von Aachen
Allegory on the Victory of Justice
1598
oil on copper
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

There is no denying, in spite (or, rather, because) of his persistent protestations to the contrary, that Suger was animated by a passionate will to self-perpetuation.  To put it less academically: he was enormously vain.  He requested the honor of an anniversary – not without a wistful admonition to future Cellarers not to be angry because of the additional expense for food and drink but to remember that it was he, Suger, who had increased the budget of their department – and thereby placed himself on the same footing as King Dagobert, Charles the Bald and Louis le Gros, the only persons previously thus honored.  He frankly thanked God for having reserved the task of rebuilding the church to "his lifetime and labors" (or, as he puts it in another place, to "so small a man who was the successor to the nobility of such great kings and abbots").  At least thirteen of the versiculi with which he covered every available space on walls and liturgical objects mention his name; and numerous donor's portraits of him were strategically disposed on the main axis of the basilica: two in the principal entrance (one in the tympanum, the other on the doors), a third one at the foot of the Great Cross that commanded the opening arch of the new upper choir and could be seen from almost every point in the church, and one or two more in the windows adorning the central chapel of the ambulatory.  When we read of Suger's huge gold-lettered inscription above the west portals ("O may it not be obscured!"), when we observe him constantly preoccupied with the memory of future generations and alarmed by the thought of "Oblivion, the jealous rival of Truth," when we hear him speak of himself as the "leader" (dux) under whose guidance the church had been enlarged and ennobled, we feel as though we listened to some of Jacob Burckhardt's evidence for "the modern form of glory," and not to the words of an abbot of the twelfth century.  

Yet there is a fundamental difference between the Renaissance man's thirst for fame and Suger's colossal but, in a sense, profoundly humble vanity.  The great man of the Renaissance asserted his personality centripetally, so to speak: he swallowed up the world that surrounded him until his whole environment had been absorbed by his own self.  Suger asserted his personality centrifugally: he projected his ego into the world that surrounded him until his whole self had been absorbed by his environment.

– Erwin Panofsky, from Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures (1946)