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 :. | Port Scene with the Departure of Ulysses from the Land of the Feaci fdg | utsikt over hamn med bimma | Two Frigates (mk17) | Seated Woman and Plants (mk17) | women in a garden |
Related Artists:
Josse Lieferinxe
active in Provence 1493-1505/08 was a South Netherlandish painter, formerly known by the pseudonym the Master of St. Sebastian. Originating in the diocese of Cambrai in Hainaut, then part of the territories ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Josse Lieferinxe was documented as a "Picard" in the regions of Avignon and Marseille at the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries. He was first mentioned in Provence in 1493. Thus he figures among the painters of the Provençal school, whose most prominent members in an earlier generation had also been from the far north of the French-speaking world Barth lemy d'Eyck and Enguerrand Quarton. In 1503 he married Michelle, a daughter of Jean Changenet, the most prominent painter of Avignon, in whose atelier Lieferinxe may have matured his style. He was last mentioned living in 1505, and in 1508 as deceased. Before he was identified by Charles Sterling who linked his work with a document, his artistic personality was recognized, as the "Master of St. Sebastian", through a former retable of eight scenes depicting the acts and miracles of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, protectors against the plague, which was commissioned in 1497 for the church of Nôtre Dame des Accoul's in Marseille. Bernardino Sismondi, who originally received the commission, died, however, before he could finish the work.
Giovan Battista Salvi Sassoferrato
1605-1685 Italian Giovan Battista Salvi Sassoferrato Gallery
James H. Cafferty
American, 1819-1869