Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over
what was real and what constituted "nature," currents that would soon
gather force to form modern science.
Natural Light deliberates on the era's uncertainties, as distilled in
the work of long underappreciated artist Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), a
native of Frankfurt who settled in Rome and whose diminutive and
mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new
ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio
was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and early modern
scientists were starting to turn to the new "world system" of Galileo.
His visual inventions influenced many famous artists--including
Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.
Julian Bell guides the reader through key Elsheimer artworks, examining
the contexts behind them before exploring the new imaginative thoughts
that opened up in their wake. He also explores the experiences of
Elsheimer and other Northern artists in the literary, artistic, and
scientific culture of 1600s Rome.
Although his life was tragically short, Elsheimer's legacy endured and
prints of his work were widely spread throughout Europe, with his
influence extending as far as the Indian subcontinent.
