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 :. | Seated Woman and Plants (mk17) | Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula | Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba df | Landscape with St Onofrio (mk17) | Ulysses Kerry race will be the return of her father Dubois |
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Hildegard of Bingen
1098-1179,German composer, abbess and mystic. Her writings include much lyrical and dramatic poetry which has survived with monophonic music. The Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum contains musical settings of 77 poems arranged according to the liturgical calendar. The poetry is laden with imagery and the music, based on a few formulaic melodic patterns, is in some respects highly individual. Her morality play Ordo virtutum contains 82 melodies in a more syllabic style.
Joseph Wolf
(January 22, 1820 - April 20, 1899) was a German artist who specialized in natural history illustration. He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the choice of illustrator for numerous explorers and collectors. He depicted animals accurately in life-like postures and has been considered one of the great pioneers of wildlife art. Sir Edwin Landseer considered him ...without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived. Wolf was the son of a farmer, and was born in Mörz near Menstermaifeld, not far from the river Moselle, in the Eifel region. In his boyhood he was an assiduous student of bird and animal life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history subjects. At the age of sixteen he went to Koblenz to work for a firm of lithographers, and then in 1840 he moved to Frankfurt. Here he provided the illustrations for Eduard Reppell's Birds of Northeast Africa.
C. Grunewald
paint Portrait of Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann German photographer in 1858