Claude Lorrain
French
1600-1682
Claude Lorrain Galleries
In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition.
In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography.
Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno).
John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart" Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt | Landscape with Abraham Expelling Hagar (mk17) | Concordia (mk17) | Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid | Morning in the Harbour | Related Artists: Phoebus Levinfl. 1836-1878 was born in Berlin but exhibited in London from 1855-1878 Aby AltsonAustralian Classicist Painter,
1864-1949 ROSSELLI, CosimoItalian Early Renaissance Painter, 1439-1507
Painter. He was documented in Neri di Bicci's workshop between May 1453 and October 1456; in 1459 he received his first known commission, for an altarpiece in Santa Tr?nita, Florence (untraced). It is thought that he subsequently worked with Benozzo Gozzoli, whose influence is evident in his early work, but Cosimo was receptive to the styles of almost all his more gifted contemporaries, including Alesso Baldovinetti (said by Baldinucci to have been his master), Andrea del Verrocchio and the Pollaiuolo brothers. Cosimo's first surviving works of importance are the frescoes in the style of Baldovinetti in the Salutati Chapel, Fiesole Cathedral, datable to between 1462 and 1466, but these are heavily restored.
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