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 :. | seaport with the embarkation of the queen of sheba | Landscape with Goatherd | Port Scene with the Embarkation of St Ursula | Seated Woman and Plants (mk17) | View of Delphi with a Procession (mk17) |
Related Artists:
Konstantin Somov
Russian Symbolist Painter, 1869-1939 Russian painter and graphic artist. He was the son of a curator at the Hermitage, and he attended the St Petersburg Academy of Art from 1888 to 1897, studying under the Realist painter Il'ya Repin from 1894. In 1897 and again in 1898-9 he went to Paris and attended the studios of Filippo Colarossi and of Whistler. Neither the Realism of his Russian teachers nor the evanescent quality of Whistler's art was reflected for long in Somov's work. He turned instead for inspiration to the Old Masters in the Hermitage and to works of contemporary English and German artists
jean Huber
Swiss Painter (b. 1721, Geneve, d. 1786, Bellevue) , Geneva1721-1786 Geneva1721-1786,Silhouettist, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His paternal ancestors were patrician Genevese merchant bankers. As a young man he soldiered at Kassel in Germany and in Italy, where he fought for Savoy in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). In 1752 he was elected to Geneva's Council of Two Hundred and served his native city as a magistrate. He had no formal artistic training, but from his youth he clipped out of paper or cards freehand profiles of a kind that later came to be called silhouettes.
CANTARINI, Simone
Italian painter, Bolognese school (b. 1612, Pesaro, d. 1648, Pesaro) Simone Cantarini (also known as Simone da Pesaro; 12 April 1612 - 1648) was an Italian painter and etcher of the Bolognese School of painting. Cantarini was born in Oropezza near Pesaro, then part of the Papal States. Initially he was a pupil of the Venetian Claudio Ridolfi and Pesarese Giovanni Giacomo Pandolfi, and then, for about 4 years (1635-1639), of Guido Reni. He soon fought with his mentor, and did not return to Bologna till after Reni had died (1642). His pictures are generally derivative. Some of his works have been mistaken for examples of Reni. Among his principal paintings are St. Anthony, at Cagli; the Magdalene, at Pesaro; the Transfiguration in the Brera Gallery, Milan; the Portrait of Guido, in the Bologna gallery; and St. Romuald, in the Casa Paolucci. His most celebrated etching is Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, honoring the heraldic arms of Cardinal Borghese.