A Man with Influence

The burglars who rifled London's Dulwich College Picture Gallery this month showed impeccable taste. They left second-rate works behind (TIME, Jan. 13), but briefly made off with some $7,000,000 worth of paintings by old masters, notably Rembrandt, Rubens--and Adam Elsheimer.

One of the most influential early-17th century painters, Elsheimer is one of those least known by today's public. Goethe praised his "true feeling for nature." Rembrandt copied his technique. Rubens collected his works and, when Elsheimer died --H at 32 in 1610, lamented: "Never again will there be a substitute for his art."

Penalty of Smallness. At last, the full sweep of his art can be seen in a retrospective exhibit. The Staedel Art Institute in Elsheimer's native Frankfurt has collected 44 of his works from both sides of the Iron Curtain--East and West Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Madrid's Prado, and London's Wellington Museum.

His oils show colors that were applied in microscopic strokes with the finest brushes. "In his day," said Rubens, "he had no equal in painting landscapes and small figures." Elsheimer also added to Renaissance clarity the mystery of nighttime. In The Burning of Troy, the city appears as a torchlit stage set, a darkened theater aflame with pillage, while the Trojan horse looms like a giant opera prop. In Flight to Egypt, Joseph leads Mary and the young Jesus on the donkey through a nocturnal romance of moonlight reflected in a silvery pond. Many elements of this theme were reproduced in Rubens' later painting of the same name. Elsheimer kept his format small--and that is one reason why his fame is small. His Glorification of the Cross wedges a battalion of saints, martyrs, angels, popes and kings, all in a state of translucent levitation, onto a 12-in. by 18-in. painting. A Roman contemporary of his described it as "one of the greatest works of mankind, if it only could have been ten times its size."

Fatal Partnership. Elsheimer's output was also relatively small because he worked slowly, with excruciating exactitude--a quality that caused the prolific Rubens to mistakenly flail his "laziness." Though he was a painter's painter, wide ly hailed by the best of his day, few of his intimates really knew much about him. Son of a Hessian distiller, Elsheimer at 20 made the painter's pilgrimage to Venice, where he captured in his brushwork the decaying city's luminous sea-shimmering colors. Soon he moved to Rome, then a restless, intellectual capital, where a painter could fairly easily reach a prince's table. But he sank into poverty. Elsheimer married an older Scottish widow--he used her as a model for his Judith Slaying Holofernes --and to meet her lust for good living, he made a fatal partnership. In return for a steady stipend from a wealthy engraver, he agreed to rush out paintings for reproduction on copper plates. Unable to keep up the flow, however, he was thrown into the San Pietro debtors' prison. Only the intervention of Pope Paul V rescued him after months in the dungeons, but Elsheimer was so weakened by the experience that he died a few weeks later. His widow promptly remarried, and the engraver went on selling Elsheimer's work without so much as including his signature.

As a result, much that was Elsheimer's does not carry his name. But art historians have definitely identified many of his works through his distinctive style and meticulous brush strokes. With the long-overdue showing in Frankfurt, Elsheimer should regain some of the high reputation that he held among his contemporaries.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.