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 David and the Three Heroes (mk17) | Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba | Vedute von Delphi mit einer Opferprozession | The Expulsion of Hagar | lenbskap med nymfen egeria |
Related Artists:
Alfred Thorne
painted Insjolandskap med gard in 1886
Karl Edaurd Biermann
painted Finstermunz Pass in Tyrol in 1830
haaken gullesons
Ytterlännäs parish, in the province of Ångermanland, belonged to the Archdiocese of Uppsala in the Middle Ages, but has been part of the Diocese of Härnösand since that was formed in 1647. The two churches of he parish, the old one from the early 13th century, and the new one from 1848-1854, are located between the communities of Nyland and Bollstabruk, within Kramfors Municipality. The Ytterlännäs New Church taken into use in 1854 is an example of the style known as a tegnarlada ("Tegnor barn") - spacious, white, clean, neo-classical. The Ytterlännäs Old Church (Ytterlännäs Gamla Kyrka) dates from the 1200s and features medieval vaults, wall-paintings and wooden sculptures, and baroque furnishings including the unusual feature of two galleries; the Ytterlännäs Madonna is regarded by experts as a particularly fine example of the work from the Hälsingland workshop of Haaken Gulleson, all in an excellent state of preservation thanks to the church's being abandoned after 1854.