According to Sauerländer, calling Rubens a master of “baroque passions” is not altogether wrong unless—as too often is the case—it becomes an excuse for ignoring his expression of religious and ethical sentiments and ideals. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that art history has appropriated Rubens as one of its greatest figures by wresting his art free from the church”—that is, from theology, liturgy, history, and his own faith. Sauerländer’s project is to put the seventeenth-century church back into the picture by giving particular attention to Rubens’s paintings of subjects—the Eucharist, saints, and martyrs—that were criticized by Reformers and intentionally reemphasized by the church.