The Flight into Egypt

Orphaned and only twelve years old, Claude Gellée left his home in Lorraine, France, and settled in Rome, where he became known as “Claude Lorrain."1 Note 1. The scholarship on the artist’s contested birth date is summarized in Marcel Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings , 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 1:4; Röthlisberger found the arguments for the 1600 birthdate to be definitive. He first found employment as a servant in the household of Agostino Tassi (1578–1644), a prominent landscape painter who had studied with the Flemish artist Paul Bril (1554–1626). Then, beginning in 1620, Claude apprenticed for two years under a German landscape specialist, Goffredo Wals (1595–1638), before returning to Tassi as a studio assistant. By 1627, Claude was working as an independent artist. His fame spread rapidly, not only through the many diplomats and ecclesiastics who traveled to Rome and saw his works, but also through engravings Claude had made of his designs, which helped to spread knowledge of his artistic talent across the continent. By 1635, he was regarded as an unsurpassed master of landscapes and seascapes, gaining the patronage of popes, cardinals, princes, and ambassadors. Apparently, jealous rivals began to copy or even create forgeries of his works.2 Note 2. This claim of forgers counterfeiting Claude’s works was recorded in the seventeenth-century biography of the artists written by Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1696). This entire biography by Baldinucci is published in English translation in Marcel Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings , 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 1:53–62; the relevant passage is at 1:59. To safeguard his reputation against such imitations, Claude began keeping visual records of most of his paintings in an album of drawings he entitled Liber Veritatis (The Book of Truth). In general terms, Claude successfully combined the classicizing Italian landscape model developed by the artists Annibale Carracci (1560–1609; fig. 1) and Domenichino (1581–1641) with the expressive qualities of the Northern European landscape tradition as practiced by Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610; fig. 2), Wals, and Bril. Claude’s skill in portraying atmospheric humidity and sunlight in all its permutations, and in combination with mist or dense masses of foliage, astounded his contemporaries. Among those who marveled at such technical virtuosity was the German artist and art biographer Joachim von Sandrart, who commented on Claude’s representation of a landscape “in which one can truly recognize how the sun, risen for some two hours above the horizon, dissipates the nebulous air and how the dew floating upon the waters really mingles astonishingly with [the air]."3 Note 3. Cited in Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman; Drawings from the British Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 25. For all its verisimilitude, Claude’s depiction of nature is never merely a raw record of what he saw. Instead, it is refined, embellished, and exalted by means of compositional formulas and stock motifs drawn from pastoral poetry. The result is a blend of real and ideal that invests the ordinary rhythms of peasant life with elegiac poetry and that invests nature with classical grandeur. Rendering his work even more appealing to contemporaries, Claude infused it with recognizable local landscape features and characteristic local flora in a perfect synthesis of experience and imagination. Figure 1: Annibale Carracci (Italian, 1560–1609), Landscape with the Flight into Egypt , about 1603, oil on canvas, 48 × 91 in. Galleria Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome, FC236. Figure 1: Annibale Carracci (Italian, 1560–1609), Landscape with the Flight into Egypt , about 1603, oil on canvas, 48 × 91 in. Galleria Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome, FC236. Figure 2: Adam Elsheimer (German, 1578–1610), The Flight into Egypt , 1609, oil on copper, 12-3/16 × 16-1/8 in. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, From t