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 :. | The Rape of Europa sd | Landscape with Noli Me Tangere Scene | Landscape with the Embarkation of Saint Paula Romana at Ostia | Landscape with the Finding of Moses sdfg | Coastal View (mk17) |
Related Artists:
TOMMASO DA MODENA
Italian Painter, ca.1325-1379
charles de brosses
(1709-77). President of the Parlement de Dijon, friend of the philosophes, and in Diderot's words ??une petite t??te gaie, ironique et satiriquee. His learned publications include important work on the origins of language (Traite de la formation m??canique des langues, 1765) and on primitive religion (Du culte des dieux fetiches, 1760). His Lettres familieres crites d Italie en 1739 et 1740, published posthumously in 1799 and much loved by Stendhal, offer a model of personal travel writing, in which detailed accounts of art works and monuments, not always complimentary, or a careful description of Vesuvius, addressed to Buffon, are interspersed with sprightly, enthusiastic accounts of the peculiarities and the aesthetic and sensual pleasures of life in Italy.
Henri Pierre Danloux
1753-1809 French French painter and draughtsman. He was orphaned at an early age and was brought up by an uncle who was an architect and contractor. Around 1770 his uncle apprenticed him to Nicolas-Bernard Lpici. He exhibited for the first time in 1771 at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in Paris, where he showed a Drunkard at a Table (untraced). About 1773 he was admitted into the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien, whom he followed to Rome in 1775 on the latter appointment as Director of the Academie de France. Danloux sketchbooks show that he also travelled to Naples, Palermo, Florence and Venice. He was not interested in the monuments of antiquity but concentrated instead on drawing landscapes and, in particular, portraits, among them that of Jacques-Louis David.