ELSHEIMER, ADAM. - Painter and engraver, b. in Frankfurt am Main in 1576, d. in Rome on 11 Dec. 1610 and buried in the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Philipp Uffenbach was his first teacher in his homeland, then E. 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 sense of those pictorial values which, shortly afterward in Rome, where he was immediately drawn to the Caravaggesque pictorial circle, enabled him to acquire a lucid clarity of expression for which he was often confused with Saraceni, whose collaborator, moreover, he also was.
In any case, the greater interest that E. holds for us depends on the fact that he was able to reduce to a clear Nordic accent, transferring them into the field of landscape painting, the Caravaggesque manners which, also through his agency, reached beyond the Alps, useful not only for the formation of a Claude Lorrain but of Rembrandt himself. In his production three phases are generally distinguished. To his earliest youth belong certain paintings such as The Preaching of the Baptist in the Pinacoteca of Munich, where the influences of Dutch painting are still evident; there follows a group of works from the Venetian period, among which are to be remembered, besides the St. Paul at Lystra in the Museum of Frankfurt, The Burning of Troy, which is in the Pinacoteca of Munich, and The Meeting of Jethro with Moses in the Museum of Nuremberg; there are then to be placed in the third period, which is that of his stay in Rome and is the most important for the influence he exerted on Nordic 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 them are preserved in the collections of Bergamo, Florence, Basel, Berlin, etc.
Bibliography4 works
Emilio Lavagnino