ELSHEIMER, ADAM. — Painter and engraver, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1576, died in Rome on 11 December 1610 and buried in the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Filippo Uffenbach was his first teacher in his native city; Elsheimer then went to Munich, but toward the end of the century he was in Venice with the German painter I. Rottenhamer. It was in the Venetian milieu that the young master grasped the significance of those pictorial values which shortly afterward in Rome, where he was immediately drawn to the Caravaggesque artistic milieu, enabled him to acquire a lucid expressive clarity, on account of which he was often confused with Saraceni, with whom, moreover, he also collaborated.
In any case, the principal interest Elsheimer holds for us derives from the fact that he was able to render, in a distinctly northern idiom and by transferring them into the field of landscape painting, the Caravaggesque modes that also through his mediation reached beyond the Alps, contributing not only to the formation of a Claude Lorrain but of Rembrandt himself. His production is generally divided into three periods. To his early youth belong several paintings such as The Preaching of St. John the Baptist in the Munich Pinakothek, where the influences of Dutch painting are still evident; this is followed by a group of works from the Venetian period, among which should be mentioned, besides St. Paul at Lystra in the Frankfurt Museum, The Burning of Troy, in the Munich Pinakothek, and The Meeting of Meté with Jethro, in the Nuremberg Museum; the third period, that of his residence in Rome and the most important in terms of the influence he exerted on northern painting, includes a group of small paintings with sacred and mythological subjects, in which the landscape generally predominates decisively over the rest of the composition; they are preserved in considerable numbers in the collections of Bergamo, Florence, Basel, Berlin, etc.