Adam Elsheimer is first recorded in 1600 and by 1610 he was dead. But, rather like Giorgione, who had died young in Venice exactly 100 years earlier, Elsheimer was influential on the coming century to a degree out of all proportion to his brief career and small oeuvre.
This is the first book on Elsheimer for nearly 30 years, illustrated for the very first time with details in colour that do justice to the extraordinary refinement and wonderful beauty of his inventive compositions, his exquisite, dreamy landscapes and his teeming, tingling backgrounds. His contemporaries (such as Rubens) knew he was a great artist, but until now it has been very difficult to appreciate his paintings in reproductions.
Born in Frankfurt, Elsheimer soon migrated to Rome, which around 1600 was the capital of contemporary art, where the new Baroque style was being forged - both by Caravaggio and native Italians and by visiting northerners such as Elsheimer himself and Rubens. Elsheimer developed a wonderful mastery of light, anticipating Claude, Poussin and a whole host of landscape painters; a dramatic chiaroscuro that gave new depth to his subject-matter - subject-matter that was often itself new (a famous example is his Flight into Egypt set at at night, with the Milky Way depicted for the first time in art in the night sky and a moon reflected romantically in the waters of a lake); and a superb touch that renders his figures uncannily human and homely.
Only 40 paintings by Elsheimer are known today, and a smaller number of drawings. He always worked on a small scale, painting meticulously in oil on a copper ground, but importing into his complex compositions sophisticated devices and effects comparable to those of the greatest commissions of the time.
Influenced himself by Altdorfer, Tintoretto and Bassano (combining northern and Italian roots), Elsheimer in turn became a revered model for both Rubens and Rembrandt, all the French and Flemish painters who visited Rome, and native Italians such as Agostino Tasso and Saraceni.
Accompanying a major exhibition in Frankfurt, Edinburgh and London, the book will become the new standard work on Elsheimer, focusing Elsheimer's role in one of the major revolutions of Western art.
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