ELSHEIMER, ADAM. — Painter and engraver, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1578, died in Rome on 11 December 1610 and buried in the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Philipp Uffenbach was his first master in his homeland, then Elsheimer went to Munich, but at the end of the century he was in Venice with the German painter I. Rottenhammer. It was in the Venetian milieu that the young master grasped the sense of those pictorial values which, shortly afterwards in Rome—where he was immediately drawn to the Caravaggist milieu—enabled him to acquire a lucid expressive clarity, for which he was often confused with SARACENI, with whom, moreover, he also collaborated.
In any case, the greater interest that Elsheimer holds for us depends on the fact that he knew how to reduce into a clear northern accent, transferring them into the field of landscape painting, the Caravaggist modes which, also through him, reached beyond the Alps, useful not only for the formation of a CLAUDIO DI LORENA but even of Rembrandt himself. In his output, three periods are generally distinguished. To his early youth belong certain paintings such as *The Preaching of St John the Baptist* in the Pinacoteca of Munich, where the influences of Dutch painting are still evident; followed by a group of works from the Venetian period, among which, besides *St Paul at Lystra* in the Frankfurt Museum, *The Burning of Troy* in the Pinacoteca of Munich and *Moses Meeting Jethro* in the Nuremberg Museum are to be noted; then come those to be placed in the third period, which is that of his stay in Rome and is the most important for the influence exerted on northern painting, a group of small pictures of sacred and mythological subject in which the landscape generally has a true predominance over the rest of the composition; a considerable number of these are preserved in the collections of Bergamo, Florence, Basel, Berlin, etc.