EAN: 9780500024072

NATURAL LIGHT - JULIAN BELL GEBUNDEN

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in
this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer  by an outstanding writer and
critic. 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 eräs uncertainties  as distilled in the work of painter Adam
Elsheimer ¿ a short-lived  tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret.
Elsheimer¿s diminutive  intense 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 circles of `natural philosophers¿ ¿ early
modern scientists ¿ were starting to turn to the new `world system¿ of Galileo. Julian Bell
transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s  where Elsheimer and other young Northern
immigrants ¿ notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens ¿ swapped pictorial and poetic reference
points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions  Bell drives at the
anxieties that underlie them ¿ a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance
today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency  most of all in
Elsheimer's final painting  a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was
completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints  Elsheimer¿s pictorial
inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt  Lorrain and Poussin. They even
reached artists in Mughal India  whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what
'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse  the whole of the
17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

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