ELSHEIMER, Adam

Adam Elsheimer often depicted rather obscure mythological subjects. This episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses was rarely depicted and this moment virtually never chosen. The nymph Coronis was Apollo’s unfaithful lover. Betrayed by a raven, Coronis was shot with an arrow by an enraged Apollo. Soon repenting his action, the god unsuccessfully tried to revive her.

Like many other works, this small painting received its title from someone other than its author. Apollo, in the foreground, plays rustic pipes rather than his noble lyre. In the background are cattle.

This small painting is undoubtedly the most beautiful example of the night scenes that brought Elsheimer so much fame. Four sources of light illuminate the greenish-blue landscape with its starry sky: the full moon on the right above the trees fringing a lake, its reflection in the water, the campfire of the cowherds on the left, from which a column of sparks rises into the darkness of the tree tops, and finally the torch in the hand of Joseph, who is leading the ass with Mary and the child. Each of these sources of light models the objects in the immediate surroundings only fragmentarily, so that illuminated areas are directly juxtaposed with unlit areas. Our gaze is drawn across expanses of impenetrable darkness, settling upon islands of fine draughtsmanship, and following the vaulted silhouettes of the tree tops.

Here, night is portrayed as a miracle that can help the holy family on their flight to Egypt. Elsheimer has succeeded in evoking a sense of danger and comfort at the same time entirely by means of the atmospheric values of his use of light and shadow. It would therefore be wrong to place the emphasis entirely on the subject of landscape. This picture represents something entirely new in the field of religious imagery, with landscape opening up possibilities of exploring new narrative contents.

Both Rubens (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel) and Rembrandt (National Gallery, Dublin) made paintings of The Flight into Egypt inspired by Elsheimer’s masterpiece. Although Elsheimer died young and his output was small he played a key role in the development of 17th-century landscape painting, and his influence is apparent in the work of many other 17th-century artists.

The cross as the focal point of the “gloria del paradiso” is revered by the saints and the elect of the heavenly realm who surround the cross on banks of clouds. On the right, we recognize the patriarchs, including Moses, Abraham and King David. We also see Jonas sitting on the fish, looking up towards the cross, and St Catherine and Mary Magdalene in a sisterly embrace. In the foreground, there is a disputation between St Sebastian and Pope Gregory, St Jerome, St Ambrose and St Augustine, with the first Christian martyrs St Stephen and St Laurence. The cross, clutched by a kneeling female figure who is probably an embodiment of Faith, is surrounded by angels bearing the instruments of the Passion, above which we can make out the Evangelists and Apostles. At the head of a procession of angels streaming into the dazzling light of the background, which is flooded with an overwhelming brightness, we can see the Coronation of the Virgin.

Elsheimer’s unique art is evident in the astonishing illusion of remarkable breadth and depth achieved by this small panel painting. Here, space is no longer simply a problem of continuously reduced scale, but also one of simultaneous graduation of colour and the distribution of light and darkness. This creates interlocking areas of colour and light which, though perceived by the eye, nevertheless take on the quality of a vision. This painting, originally part of a triptych, is widely regarded as Elsheimer’s greatest masterpiece.

The painting depicts Mercury rising up into the air carrying a cloaked female with a golden apple and a bunch of flowers in her hands. The story is based on a Spanish novel translated into Italian in 1606.

Elsheimer painted a few pictures in which figures predominate, but generally they are fused into a harmonious unity with their landscape settings. They are invariably on a small scale and on copper.

This painting is the first work by Adam Elsheimer on a silver ground. This technical innovation may in part account for the work’s relatively small size.

Adam Elsheimer’s early works were still clearly in the tradition of sixteenth-century painting and printmaking; yet at the same time the Flemish landscape painters working in Frankenthal were also an important influence on him. In 1598 he travelled to Venice; from around 1600 he is known to have been in Rome; and in 1606 he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in that city, where he was able to explore the works of contemporary artists such as Caravaggio or Paul Bril.

From ¹⁶⁰⁶⁄₀₇ he produced a number of paintings based on episodes from the Metamorphoses by the Roman author Ovid, including the story of Jupiter and Mercury at the House of Philemon and Baucis. Philemon and Baucis was an old couple who, according to Ovid (Met. 8:621-96) once gave hospitality in their humble cottage to two travellers who had been turned away from other, richer houses. During supper, to the hosts’ astonishment, the wine bowl miraculously replenished itself; their only goose, which they would have killed for the occasion, flew to the visitors for refuge. Jupiter and Mercury, for it was they, then revealed themselves to Philemon and Baucis, and took them up to the mountainside where they observed that the whole country was covered with flood waters, except for the cottage which had been changed into a temple. Granted a wish by Jupiter, the old man and woman chose to be priests of the temple. At their death they were changed into an oak and a lime tree.

In Elsheimer’s day, the story would have been read as a parable of divine revelation to humanity, most especially to the poor, and as having strong analogies with Biblical tales. The painter does not show the transformation, but rather concentrates on the hospitality extended to the gods by the married couple, as is described at length in Ovid, and more specifically on the events before the meal. The low door and the cramped space inside the hut, the bed covered with its simple covers, the care and attention showered on the guests - Elsheimer takes all this from Ovid and presents it, enriched by a couple of motifs of his own, to the viewer. Even the goose, which the aged couple intended to slaughter for the wanderers and that was spared at the gods’ behest, can be seen in the foreground.

By situating the scene indoors, Elsheimer’s depiction differs strongly from the admittedly rare earlier examples of this subject. The artificial light sources are given special significance: to the left, an oil lamp brightens the faces of the gods and lends them additional force; to the right, a somewhat weaker light illuminates in particular the still-life in the foreground. In this the picture matches a series of nocturnes that Elsheimer painted during the same period in Rome with the aim of mastering the techniques of Caravaggio.

This small cabinet painting, on copper like many of Elsheimer’s works, was disseminated in engravings and copies, and even Rembrandt was to draw inspiration from it.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Charles Gounod: Phil�mon et Baucis, aria

Among the inventions not from Ovid but unique to the painting is a picture on the wall, probably a coloured print. On examining an engraving taken from the painting, Goethe considered that the print showed one of Jupiter’s ‘amorous pranks performed with Mercury’s aid’. There may well be a streak of humour in the way that Jupiter’s gaze glides over the picture. At the same time, this picture within a picture reflects the very function of the cabinet picture we are looking at.

In this Giorgionesque scene by Elsheimer, some of Rotterhammer’s (his master’s) eroticism is still in evidence. However, while the nude may lack articulation, the landscape does not. This scene anticipated the art of Claude Lorrain and Guercino, bringing to the North a novel romantic freedom.

The theme of the Rest on the Flight is primarily associated with the northern countries and first came into its own c. 1500 during the golden age of German painting. The paintings by Altdorfer and Lucas Cranach the Elder give the scene a magical, fairy-tale quality. The artist’s conception of nature at that period was, of course, quite different from that of today. In the sixteenth century the forest was not seen as romantic, but rather as a place fraught with hidden dangers; a century later, when Elsheimer painted his Holy Family, nothing had changed. The angels and the figure of Joseph, even the treatment of light, were clearly inspired by Altdorfer’s pictures, but the way in which the heavenly messengers descend to protect the travellers and light up the dark forest reveals the first traces of Baroque art.

In this piece, Elsheimer combined two legendary events: the Holy Family resting during the flight to Egypt and the tender reunion of the Christ child with the infant John upon their return. On the left are the lamb of God with the staff (attribute of the Baptist) and the banner wound around the tree, bearing the words ‘Ecce [agnus dei]’. On the right is Joseph the carpenter with his axe. Even thought he has a rightful place in the scene, he has also been formally allocated the function of a ‘repoussoir’ figure, adding a further element to the establishment of depth in the composition. Angels with wreaths and singing praises fill the space of the painting.

Adam Elsheimer was born in 1578 in Frankfurt-on-Main. His first teacher, Philipp Uffenbach, owned a collection of old German drawings which had been left to him by Gr�newald. Here we find a direct link between Elsheimer’s youth and the art of the D�rer period. The painter left his home at a fairly early age and went to Venice, where he worked with the Munich painter Hans Rottenhammer. It is presumably to this period that the Berlin painting belongs. Its style betrays the influence of Tintoretto, while the composition is modelled on similar works by Rottenhammer. But, in comparing the two German artists, one is aware of the marked superiority of the disciple, who was not content to accept the formality and smoothness of the late Mannerist school and who tried to inject a new truth into traditional themes. Only when he settled in Rome c. 1500 did he find his own conception reflected in the trend towards realism that emanated from the art of Caravaggio. Here he met the young Rubens and became acquainted with the landscape art of the Flemish painters Paul and Matthäus Bril.

Elsheimer’s art combined an awareness of nature, which was rooted in old German tradition, with an appreciation of the human body, which derived from monumental paintings of the Renaissance. In his own paintings, however, Elsheimer never abandoned the small format which alone enabled him to continue treating details with such loving care. Although the slow pace at which he worked was criticized by his contemporaries, this did not in any way lessen their admiration of his work. His art, his observation of nature, had an influence that was not confined to Italy but also extended northwards, where Rubens and Rembrandt were also subject to it.

The picture was acquired for the Berlin Gallery from a private collection in Nuremberg in 1928.

In the upper part of the painting, which may have been intended for the private altar of a patron with traditional artistic taste, angels with wreaths and singing praises fill the space of the painting.

This is the only known portrait by Elsheimer. It is an admirable record of his appearance, although the conventional format gives little hint of the tremendous influence his pictures had, not only on his northern contemporaries, but also on the whole community of painters in Rome.

The demand for landscape painting among educated Italian patrons of the Renaissance was stimulated by their reading of Pliny the Elder’s first-century Latin text on ancient art. Collectors applied his desciptions of Greek and Roman specialists in different kinds of pictures to their own contemporaries. German and Netherlandish artists, with their magical ability to depict delightful vistas in the backgrounds of religious paintings were soon identified by Italian clients as potential purveyors of ‘pastoral’ or ‘rustic’ pictures to rival the effects of the lighter veins of poetry and music. Northerners under the spell of Italian art theory complied with this view.

Elsheimer’s precious little pictures on copper helped to transform landscape from a decorative adjunct to a major artistic genre. Trained in Germany and Venice and adept at both figure and landscape painting, Elsheimer gave visual form to two equally exotic impulses: awe of Northern woods and waters, and nostalgia for the ancient Mediterranean past.

This paintng belongs to the former category, although it treats two episodes from the Acts of Apostles (27:41-4; 28:1-6): the shipwreck of St Paul on the island of Malta and the miracle of the viper. Barely harder than a human hand, it recreates the effect of multiple illumination to reveal a drama of nature’s might, human frailty and divine intervention. Lightning flashes on waves crashing against the shore, the spume rising to the top of gnarled trees clinging to the rocks. A beacon burns on the clifftop. The survivors gathered in the foreground dry their clothes, aided by the natives. As sparks fly upwards, the firelight glows warm on Italianate nudes and a wrinkled Nothern crone.

The source of this nocturnal scene was Jan Brueghel the Elder, who was active in Rome during the mid-1590s.

This tiny painting demonstrates Elsheimer’s extraordinary skill as a painter of oval works. The landscape, bathed in light, is exceptionally delicate. A distant castle on the left is immersed in the atmospheric, hazy blue of the mountains, while to the right minutely observed figures carry out their rural occupations on soft woodland slopes.