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 :. | cattle farmer and the landscape | Landscape with Merchants sdfg | Country cape with the father of Psyche that at Apollo sacrifices | utsikt over hamn med bimma | Hagar und Ismael in der Wuste |
Related Artists:
LOO, Louis Michel van
French painter (b. 1707, Toulon, d. 1771, Paris). Painter, son of Jean-Baptiste van Loo. He trained with his father in Turin and Rome, later attending the courses of the Academie Royale in Paris. He received the institution's first prize for painting in 1726, and in 1728, accompanied by his brother, Francois, and his uncle, Carle, returned to Rome where he was associated with Francois Boucher. On his way back to France, he stayed for a time in Turin, painting portraits of the royal family of Sardinia, the Duke and Duchess of Savoy. In Paris he was admitted to membership of the Academie Royale and in 1735 was appointed assistant teacher at the Academie, becoming renowned as a specialist in portrait painting. Most of his portraits from this period are half-length, combining ideas from Hyacinthe Rigaud's later work with other more natural and innovative ones. On the death of Jean Ranc, Philip V of Spain asked Rigaud to suggest a substitute, and van Loo was proposed. He arrived in Madrid in 1737 and remained there as Pintor de la Corte until 1752, responding with modern aesthetic ideas to the demands of the Spanish monarchs for pomp and splendour. He carried out court commissions but devoted part of his time to teaching, his pupils often becoming studio assistants. He also took an active part in meetings held over a number of years to establish the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando, for which he produced the canvas, the Education of Cupid by Venus and Mercury
August Christian Hauck
(1742 -1801 ) - Painter
GOLTZIUS, Hendrick
Dutch Baroque Era Painter and Engraver, 1558-1617 Dutch draughtsman, printmaker, print publisher and painter. He was an important artist of the transitional period between the late 16th century and the early 17th, when the conception of art in the northern Netherlands was gradually changing. Goltzius was initially an exponent of Mannerism, with its strong idealization of subject and form. Together with the other two well-known Dutch Mannerists, Karel van Mander I and Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, he introduced the complex compositional schemes and exaggeratedly contorted figures of Bartholom?us Spranger to the northern Netherlands. These three artists are also supposed to have established an academy in Haarlem in the mid-1580s, but virtually nothing is known about this project. In 1590 Goltzius travelled to Italy, thereafter abandoning Spranger as a model and developing a late Renaissance style based on a broadly academic and classicizing approach. Later still, his art reflected the growing interest in naturalism that emerged in the northern Netherlands from c. 1600.